Our next door park, the domain...across that the world famous Opera House 
Don't mind the bats!
pretty sure batman lives in sydney
the view from #1103
the view slightly north, yup, harbour bridge and opera house...thx QIAGEN!Since our stay in Bondi Jct was temporary, big C found us a spot for QIAGEN to pay for in Woolloomooloo. pretty sure that's how you spell it;). hilarious when we tell sydneysiders what suburb we live in, and they say, "huh? can you spell that?" actually i can, and will. learn. the Domain park is gorgeous (one uses that work a lot when describing sydney) as it's right on the harbour. there's quite a few walking/running trails, resident wildlife, and picnic spots. if you are lucky enough to visit, maybe we'll show ya a few. so, let's discuss the bats. what the hell. no guidebook has ever mentioned the bats. i guess there's a few things you have to discover for yourself...which is actually a good thing. literally thousands of fruit bats live in the domain. they migrate every night to Centennial park, which we get to watch from our balcony. when we take a walk through the domain, no else seems to think the bats are as cool as we do...but come on man! bats! they're crazy! seriously, gotham city must be sydney.
our new digs are solid. not quite as convenient as the junction, but much more scenic. it's affording us the chance to live the city life for a bit. this is fun, but i don't think either of us are city people. briana watches enough Sex in the City to make one think she may be a city girl, but after checking out the northern beaches, we aren't.
so we rented a car for a week to check out what we have been missing. after heading up to the northern beaches to have a look at a few apartments, yes, it is confirmed, sydney has quite a few similarities to SD. the northern beaches are just like north county SD. the place that everyone wants to live in, but do they want to deal with the traffic!?! i was on the verge of biting the bullet and buying a house up in glorious north county where i grew up, but then Oz came through and that was put on hold. and now, here we are, tens of thousands of miles away, and here's our new north county. heck, SD is even on the same parallel as Sydney...just in the other hemisphere. so we're in it to win it. after seeing a couple of really nice apartments up here, we though we should check out the local beaches to make sure it's sweet as. here's the run down. manly, yes, that's really the name of the beach, has a lot of men on it. bad joke. a lot of tourists though, too similar to bondi. moving north, there's freshwater beach. actually, just before that is north steyne, or north manly, but it's still the same beach, so we'll skip it. supposedly decent surf here, but i'm sure crowded with travellers as they've all taken the ferry from circular quay and never went back. anyways, freshwater looks like a cool beach to hang out on, and play skimball of course, but there's two big headlands locking this place into walled up surf i'm sure. next is curl curl, or curlie as they say. loooooong beach, which is great b/c the south end faces a bit north, and the north end a bit south. so on the south swells, which are prominent here right now, head to north curlie. around curlie's headland is dee why. this is a well known beach for it's barrelling righthand reef break. haven't seen it blow up yet, but it supposedly gets hairy, shallow and really good. the next headland is long reef, and it's supposedly sharky (more on this later), but a solid reef break on the right swells. just north is narrabeen, another famous beach of sydney. quite a few pros have come out of narrabeen...ozzie wright to name one off the cuff. north narrabeen is the spot, but i hear when it gets good, just pick a bank down the beach and get pitted. after narrabeen, there's newport, bungan, avalon...basically lots of beaches and lots of setups. slater has a house in avalon, so you know it's good up there (check youtube).
ok ok ok, get excited, our stuff is here, just went to go pick up a few items....including boards! grabbed the good old 5'10" KG Larry Mabile twinzer fish since the surf outlook didn't look so hot. thursday in maroubra was 2-3' with the occasional plus set. again, no bra boy attitude, but it probably gets a little local when the surf is actually worth yelling about. first experience surfing, and there are some animals in the water here! jellies to be exact. i had seen the famous blue bottles on the sand, don't step on these, but there were jellies in the water as well. pretty simple, just gently lift your hand out of the water if you feel one while paddling, but still sketchy. that saturday, we hit Curlie, as we had seen a place in north curl curl that we wanted to rent. north curlie was picking up the south swell in the water, and though the reports were calling for waist to chest, it was easily head high. nice, they under call it here. the paddle out was a bit more hectic. i tried to go straight out to the lineup from where we we had posted up on the sand, but the current was blasting onshore, so it took a good 15 minutes, and what felt like 45 duckdives. not fun. felt like when you take a wave too far in and get stuck over the reef at hermosas in la jolla. brutal. especially for a guy who has only surfed once in 3 months! problem is, as you paddle out it gets shallow, deep, shallow then deep again. so the water sucks across these sand bars and you get to paddle for awhile. caught a few solid ones, did SD proud i think, and we headed home thinking this a place where we could live. next day, back to curlie, swell had dropped, but still fun ones to be had. water has really warmed up of late, back to 22C. less blue bottles on the beach, which means prime time for skimball! got some waves too, still really fun and standing up down the shallow banks. this time i watched where some of the locals had paddled out, ahhhhhh, you must paddle out on the north side of the bank, and then paddle south and pick your peak. excellent, that'll be a mistake i only make once.
note for nico, there's a huge dog park along the lagoon in curl curl beach...you'll be there soon, bff. special shout out to brad for taking care of my little buddy!
next week we're signing a lease at 34 monash parade, dee why, nsw. found a great place with an even better view. google map it, then get jealous;)...or just visit. we'll be waiting for ya...
shakeNbake
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