Tim Goldsmith

Waiting. Waiting. Delays to our flight. What a hassle. We’ll make it to Paris eventually. Thankfully we have stories of good times with Stu & Suse to chat about, good times spent with Tim & Maret, plus a crazy week in the Highlands. Oh, and I just scored a free food voucher. £5 is nothing to sniff at!

I guess I have a sort of love/hate relationship with road trips. I do enjoy having open road in front of me, knowing that there is unlimited potential lying there. Who knows what’s going to be in front of me? On the other hand, I occasionally struggle, because I usually when I am travelling, I am trying to get somewhere & when there is a destination that is in my mind, then the exciting stuff that I might pass on the way can loose a little of it’s lustre. It is hard for travelling stuff to maintain a shine when the destination is my sister’s place in Wagga Wagga. Amy and Andrew (Sis & Bro in Law) are heaps of fun to hang out with, all three of the kids are gorgeous & this time my Dad is down here to boot! So my travel tales over the 6 hour period are pretty minimal. I listened to test cricket for almost the whole time on the way down (Australia won the “Ashes”, Yay!!!!), and I only really stopped for a bit of petrol & some lunch, then for a couple of happy snaps of a hill. And now when I think about it, I am not sure I am building too many stories here, or at least ones I want to share. It is great just to hang with the kids (they grow so fast!) chat to Amy & Dad, and watch episodes of “firefly” at night (A&A’s current obsession, and possibly a future one of mine!). So meanwhile, you’ll have to make do with a couple of pictures. One old, a couple new. Here is a pic that I took when I went out with Jodi Mac the other week. Love Sydney! A pretty tree on the way to Wagga. (Best viewed large) More road shots…

It’s true, Summer is a state of mind. When Adam and I arrived at the Hunter Valley 1am on Monday morning, it was a chilly zero degrees! The electirc blankets that my stepdad had thoughtfully turned on for us though, spoke of warmer times. The toasty interior was matched my a sunny exterior the next morning! Blue skies, rolled-down windows, then crisp beers, and it could have been January (Sorry to you poor Northern Hemisphere people, to whome this whole blog will seem confusing)! All that said, it could have been cloudy & miserable & it would have been summer time. Such is the joy of good company (Ads and Colin), great family (Dad & Aunty Susie, who in an aside, conclusively proved that I am blessed with a “fun” family with whom anyone can enjoy hanging out with, having some wine & playing some pool), good food & great surrounds! We were only there from Sunday night till Tuesday afternoon, but I certainly feel well rested from the experience, even after spending a morning following the manly pursuit of wood splitting! (Of course, Adam swings an axe like a girl swings a handbag! Thankfully I was there to return testosterone to the town!). People occasionally ask me why my skin is always so warm, even in miserable wintery weather? Well, you can bring on the miserable outdoor weather, cause it doesn’t mean an fig, when you can draw on the inner glow of good times! Here’s a couple of pictures of Tasmania. Another time when I expected winter & got summer (Though, as warm & happy as it looks, it was bloody cold down there!0

I see those little foxtails & it takes me to a special place! If you have a Flickr account, click on this pic & view it large. That tree was so cool! So many little & twisty branches! Another pic that is best viewed large. I look at the deep dark road against the warm light & it just makes me want to travel. It reminds me of an old Tolkien poem from LOTR (apologies if I get a word or two wrong, I’m doing it from memory.) The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone, and I must follow if I can, pursuing it with eager feet, until it finds some larger way, where many paths and errands meet, and whither then? I cannot say.

On second thoughts you can ignore my last post if you want (all the prelim photos are pretty average anyway). The really exciting thing about Tasmania, and the one that really should be first cab off the rank, was the reason I was there in the first place. James & Anita’s wedding was awesome! They are a pair of champions, the wedding party was good fun, I enjoyed taking the photos & I met some really cool people that day! Everything else is just gravy. Here’s a shot of the happy couple.

OK ladies & Gents, I am most likely to be missing in action over the next couple of weeks. I’m off to Tasmania tomorrow, driving around there for a week, then knocking off the Great Ocean Road for a couple of days, before visiting my sister in Wagga Wagga! Hopefully I will have a nice pic or two to show you all when I get back. In the mean time, here are a couple of shots from Charlotte’s birthday today. Charlotte shows Peter (my brother’s father in law & a great guy) how to play some hot licks on the “Wiggles Guitar” Charlotte gets a little help from P&K with the blowing. She’s great at many things but her candle blowing… sucks… (OK, a painful play on words, but I couldn’t help myself) I got to sink a beer while watching (and very occasionally helping) some of the adults put together a kids play set. Fun for all the family!

6am wake up, do a little study, put on my game face. 8am drive, pick up Naomi, Lisa and Fiona, drive to ‘the Shire’, find Inaburra Christian School. 9:30 am, run a ‘Kids Church’ session. Midday lunch. 1pm-5pm… pretty much just faff around & get myself ready for he night service. 6:30pm is night service, 7:20PM I stand up to preach. 7:37 I am done.8-something I have finished being social, 9 something I have dropped the girls off, picked up Subway & I am back at college. 10pm I am cursing the dryer that has busted, meaning I have very limited clothing options tomorrow morning. 11:02… time to send a web page updatte. Not so interesting, but to be expected after busy enough day one for mission… This is Alyssa from Iron and Clay. Weird, cause I met this band in a previous incarnation in my old Vision Valley days.

I fell asleep sometime around 1:30am on Sunday night, so I was not ultra psyched about a 6am start, especially when I woke first at 5:20! If I have an early start, I tend to do that, worryiing that I might be late. Petrol stop, picked up some L&P for the drive & then headed out to Chatswood to pick up my co-conspirator Kirsty. OK, bonus point NO.1 comes because even though I was 5 minutes early at 7:25, she was well and truly ready. Bonus points No.2 through to about 247 because she had just finished cooking the bacon and egg sandwiches for us to eat for breakfast as we headed on the 3 1/2 hour drive to Canberra, the nations capital! An hour later, anything that might be considered traffic was left in our wake, the cruise control was firmly set on 110kph, B&E sandwich in hand, iPod performing it’s appointed role and good chats were being had! First stop was the lovely “Cockington Green”, which is a bunch of minaturised villiages from England (a house was maybe hip-height at best) and a whole heap of famous structures from around the world. I made sure to take advantage of the only opportunity to tell a girl that she looked huge, as Kirst towered over a bunch of buildings, churches & trees! The icing on the cake was the English pub that happened to be right next store to Cockington Green. A pint of guiness finishes a morning spent looming over villages off quite nicely!

One of the streets @ Cockington Green. The National Art Gallery was the real reason that we were in the ACT. Jackson Pollock, Picasso, Sydney Nolan, Monet, & a host of other stuff to cruise around & check out. We also enjoyed the special attention that we appeared to get from the security guards as they radioed each other & kept a keen eye on us as we moved from room to room. Nothing says “Sexy” like posing behind a “Burial Pole”! Kirsty works the profile! By this point, Kirsty & I were firmly establishing the fact that we were two individuals who epitomised class and sophistication. This was only enforced by our lunch-time stop at KFC! Canberra gets their own bonus point here, cause their gravy actually appears to be made from…. gravyish ingredients, as opposed to the brown watery substance that passes for gravy in the rest of the nation. The girl at the counter who also worked out how to get Kirsty’s custom combination for $1 cheaper than she usually pays, also rates a mention! Lunch by Lake Burleigh Griffin was lovely in the shade, though the giant fountain that we had fleetingly seen in action as we passed throughout the day, remained shockingly silent as we sat within spitting distance of it. Possibly the only disappointment of the afternoon. Enjoying a moments rest post-gustation, still, at this point, with the vain hope that I will see some action from the fountain. It was not to be… What visit to the nations capital would be complete without a visit to the parliament. We decided that we have one of the cooler parliament buildings! Kirst & I walked up the right hand slope of it & sat under the flag to enjoy the view of the whole city! For we are young and free! So, all that remained was a 3 1/2 hour drive home. More good chats, a focus on Samba and Bossanova, and some hard yards in the eating stakes, as we had to work through the remains of a pack of almond M&M’s, sour skittles and gummi snakes! A last furtive glance at the great day that lay behind us. 9:15, we pulled back into Kirsty’s drive. Our thirst for travel, art, adventure, B&E sandwiches, photography, and an overdose of sugar had been slaked! With wearyness clothing my bones like a tight suit, I limped on home, unwound for 20 minutes & then completed an almost perfect day by heading off to what proved to be the rarest of all treasures! More than 8 hours sleep!!!! The holidays are almost over, but I’m ready now for the new year.

The wedding went well. My speech went OK, my travel back to Australia was good, but my attempts to get my laptop to work have been a spectactular failure. My pictures wont seem to download properly, my email wont update properly, and it is kicking up a general fit too! I think I might give up and go to bed! I hope leaving it off for a day will help it out. TCG.><>.

We made it to our flight to Aukland on time, we managed to get a car when we got to Aukland too (Bigger than our first, though only slightly)! We managed to find Christy’s place without a problem, and we managed to make it out of Aukland and up the coast with Tim Dallimore to spend the night celebrating his impending marriage. North Island so far has been fairly fun. It is very different to South Island, being flatter, more densly populated and (thankfully) having less sandflies. So the night before last, saw the 4 boys become 5, heading north on a little adventure. We stopped for dinner at a restaurant called the “ship and anchor”, where we learned that “Black and Tan” doesn’t separate well in the antipedes, and that inflatable chickens receive strange looks from waitresses…. We continued North to a place whose name escapes me. We found a comfortable motel that had beds for 5, we found a comfortable bottle of Port that had enough contents for 5 (almost) and we found a comfortable game of “Emperor and Scum” (the official sponsor of “Boys Tour 2005″) to keep us entertained for the night! The next morning we headed out to Goat Island, famous for their snorkling. We wouldn’t be put off by rain clouds and wind, and continued on. Despite the miserable weather, and small issues with visability underwater, the snorkeling was awesome! I got to see a Stingray that was as big as me, and I watched some colourful fish that would have been about 10kg eating an octopus who was making his (last) feelings known by spurting out all of his ink! It was really a pretty cool time. We dropped Tim back off home, then headed back out in the direction of the Bay of Islands. I would love to chat more about our Kayaking today (in the end only a day trip) that included paddling right up under the lip of a waterfall, but my time is just about out on this machine. Look forward to the next, and final installment (God willing) entitled “The reason for the season” as the wedding, and actual purpose for our being here, draws near!!!!

Actually we can, dinner last night was pretty awesome. Dinner last night was also held in a little shelter, huddled around a portable camping stove. Pasta in a cream sauce with tuna, followed by chicken soup (entree & main course were back to front because we forgot about the soup) with Chocolate & peaches for desert & then a rye whisky and ginger ale as a digestive! I guess the title should really say “We can’t SEE Mt. Cook”. We arrived in the afternoon, set up the tents, the boys went for a short walk & then the rain set in. I found the public shelter, so we all swung over there, cooked dinner, had a couple of casual drinks & spent the night playing “Emperor and Scum”. It really was an awesome time! I’m a little bummed that we couldn’t see Mt. Cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. I was also bummed that I missed out on photographing the famous turqoise lakes that surround, but I’m over it. I have many good photos from the last week anyway, and it is OK to give up a couple of photos if it means spending quality time with three mates, a small fire making impliment & duty free liqour! This evenings blog was brought to you from a public library in Christchurch! Tomorrow it is a flight to Aukland! Things are only going to get more exciting! TCG.><>.