the last day of the school holidays

it was the last day of the easter holidays for the girls today. this fortnight seems to have gone on forever and the weather is still really nice and warm (walking outside in the day is still t-shirt or light jumper weather).

i was at church 7am to 1pm doing sound this morning (usual mixture of gremlins making it as challenging as ever unfortunately). then, after lunch, we headed over to our local beach Long Bay. This time we headed south ‘up and over’ the cliff to do a couple of geocaches.

at one point we saw this sign so thought we’d give it a go. at the bottom was a deserted little beach which only revealed itself during the low tide.

we had a bit of a wander about, watching out the tide didn’t come in. there were some great trees precariously dangling on the to cliff

then we climbed back up to do another geocache. which we failed to find. but we did meet some other cachers who were very nice and did another cache with them just up the road.

and on the way back to the car we saw this really weird plant so we stopped to inspect

and it was only then that we found it was also covered in funky caterpillars

i’ve no idea what the plant is. this spiky mini-balloon things were quite intriguing

it turns out the caterpillars are for monarch butterflies

they seemed to be directional. i guess to confuse predators and photographers.

anyway …

we did see a monarch butterfly today across the road from where we live. we went across to an open home which was for sale – I think jane’s mentioned previously that this is what people do at the weekend. we weren’t just being nosey neighbours though (honest).

in fact this was the nicest house for sale we’ve seen so far – and i’m going to go along to watch the auction in a few weeks’ time to see how much it goes for (and how auctions work). All good preparation for if/when we eventually think about buying somewhere

and in other news we found this on our walk. it’s a little bivvy bag tent type thing in a bush.

for those in twyford it reminded us of Pongo Stonks tent in the corner of Lodge Road near the Chocoloholics place. there used to be a tent in the scrub land there and the girls (jane included) made up a story of a chap called Pongo Stonks who lived in Brogoly, Brogoly Park with his wife Pongolina and their dogs Poodle Popkins and Poodle Wadge.