Five Rocks Headland & Beach – Byfield National Park

Monthly Archives: May 2007

A Trip To Sydney

Well, if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the last two weeks, here’s your answer. My family and I have been down to the Sydney region for a wedding. I have divided this post into two parts, and because I don’t want to spend hours writing this I won’t go into a lot of detail of what I did.

The Places We Stayed

OK, first of all we left our house on the 29th of April, at about 6:00AM. We drove straight through to the Gold Coast, which we reached at about 5:00PM. Stopping there for two nights, we had a rest. On the first day of May (the 1st), we drove down to Hat Head and stayed there two nights as well. We then went from Hat Head to Newcastle, where we stayed one night. From Newcastle, it was a straight trip through Sydney to Gerringong, where we stayed for 3 nights and left on Monday, the 7th of May.

Arriving at Newcastle again that day, we stayed for one night. Tuesday night we arrived at the Gold Coast again, where we stayed for only one night. We then left for Childers on Wednesday, and that was the last place we stayed before reaching home. Because we all wanted to get home, we left the next day and arrived back here at about 3:00PM.

The Things We Did

Obviously I can’t list all the things that I did, so I’ll just list a few. The first thing that I’ll list was our drive down to some really big sand dunes a little bit south of Hat Head. We had quite a bit of fun on them, as we had brought along some cardboard to slide down on. Below is a photo.

Sand Dunes at Hat Head

The next thing we did was the main reason we came down to Sydney, the wedding. We went to that on Saturday the 5th May. It was a nice wedding, although in my opinion the fruit juice punch ran out much too quickly. The food was nice, although the icing on the wedding cake almost made me sick :( I was happy to meet my new cousin, too, who is 9 years old.

Probably the most enjoyable thing I did was to go motorbike riding at my cousin’s farm near Gerringong. I forget the brand of the motorbike, but I can tell you that it had three gears and no clutch. Because of the high rainfall in that area, I had to ride through a few creek crossings. Because of that, I arrived home with mud all over the back of my shirt and shoes. And yes, I did fall off – once when we were going back to the house. Basically I think my hand accidently revved the bike too hard, it raced ahead, and I fell off.

SES Cadets : 10/05/2007

This post is the fourth of a continuing series on my blog that will describe what I do every Thursday night at SES Cadets.

You may have noticed that there is no post for the 3rd of May. The reason for this lapse is because I and my family were down near Sydney, attending a wedding. We didn’t get back until about 3:00PM today. Anyway, you can hear about what I did in another post.

Tonight we continued practicing skills that we will need for the SES Camp that is supposed to be next month. One of the skills is learning knots, so we did about 15 minutes of knot tying. My favourite is either the Alpine Butterfly or the Bowline. The latter can be done with only one hand, and the only difficulty is getting your hand back through the hole.

Another skill we practiced was putting up a cliff rescue frame. The shape is a triangular based pyramid, and it has one bar going across the ground with two pairs of bars pointing out at an angle opposite each other. A pulley is then attached to the side hanging over the ground, and a rope (I think) is attached to the side hanging over the cliff. The people manning the equipment can then raise and lower the side hanging over the cliff, as well as pulling up the people who need rescuing.

The last thing that we did was to learn how to safely put a person into a stretcher, and then carry it. After that, we packed up the chairs and tables and waited to be picked up.