We're back!

To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery but rituals of reassurance. Phillip Andrew Adams.

The Sunshine Coast ~ that northern paradise that attracts southern tourists like pollen attracts bees or honey flies. Every year at this time it rains. Always. It is the wet season but still the tourists flock north expecting sunshine & golden beaches. Instead they are likely to get: 2 cyclones generating big seas, big clouds & lots & lots of rain. When that happens the powers that be shut the beaches. And this is why. There was no beach. The king tides & high seas meant the white water started at the very foot of the dunes & churned out dumpers all the way to sea.

Our last day we got in a beach walk. Some erosion but now school's gone back there were miles & miles of empty beach stretching away in either direction.





With bluebottles. Lots of bluebottles. They clustered together all along the tide line ~ one reason I don't swim up here. Not that I can't; I don't. These nasty little blighters sting like wasps & the water is so swamped with them it is impossible to swim without getting stung. Mum had one wrap round her ankle just walking along the beach. UGH!












Plenty to see. Everything from common gulls to the exotic. I do hope the bottom pic blows up. The jelly~fish is pretty ugly & quite dead but Ditz spotted the sac in the bottom left hand corner where a baby jelly~fish was struggling to be born. We watched for absolute ages & as the jelly~fish was much to large to move Ditz dug a channel around it so the water could pool for the baby until the tide came in again. It was probably someone's dinner but just the same~ a WOW! moment.