Brass Monkies

Autumn is setting in here which, to our sensitive Northern Hemisphere sensibilities, is a bit strange.  It does feel like it should be Autumn, but it doesn't feel like it should be May.  There are lots of European trees around to go brown and red to make us feel at home.  The photo above is from Hahndorf, Australia's oldest German settlement, where the main street is lined with trees like this.  There's even a brochure giving the route of a tour around the hills just to soak in the colours.

At the same time as going cooler, there's been quite a lot of rain, so suddenly all the scenery that was browny-yellow is green, and flowers are starting to bloom. You can smell autumn, but it smells of spring at the same time too.

Our house has only one built in heater/cooler, which is fine for the main living area, but means the bedrooms are freezing at night.  Especially our bedroom, which has 2 walls to the outside.  Houses here are generally pretty flimsy compared with the UK's.  It's very unusual for the actual structure to be made of brick.  They're usually a wooden or steel frame with a brick veneer.  Nobody has double-glazing.  In fact, lots of people have genuinely never heard of double glazing.  To be fair, it will only get as low as 5 degrees C in winter, so there's not much call for it.  

So, in response to the chilly weather, we did what any good group of Taylor's would do: went to the beach.  With my mum's eternal phrase "I've sat on beaches in worse weather than this..." ringing in my ears, we decided to drive to the beach which is the very closest to our house.  We hadn't bothered with O'Sullivan's Beach before as it's next to an oil refinery.  I had visions of oil covered birds and washed up plastic containers, like they always seemed to have on John Craven's Newsround, just before the final article about how Pee-Pee the Panda moved one leg slightly towards Ding-dong from Beijing zoo, who they were trying to mate it with.

It's actually a great beach, with sand dunes ace for doing stunts on, and choppy seas that produce a foam which Robert and Owen spent a good hour chasing.

All we needed to make it the full Taylor beach experience was a picnic in blue plastic boxes from Dad's work, an orange, yellow and blue windbreak, and Dad's turquoise trunks, which he must have worn each year for at least 20 years.  Maybe next time.