Thrills and Spills

This week it was cloudy and rainy all week, which is wonderful for the folks who live here, because we’re in the 6^th year of a drought, but for Wesley, who only has 3 weeks here, it’s not so great. We took him to the Sunshine Coast on Christmas Eve for the beach experience, and hope to take him to the Gold Coast this coming week. The picture is of Wesley on a boogie board in the surf on the Sunshine Coast. Yesterday he and the rest of the Hearn and Mercer kids went horseback riding at a spot on a river that’s a popular swimming hole. Wesley swung off a rope into the water and landed on a rock, leaving a pretty nasty chunk of skin peeled away from his foot (also pictured here). We doused it in Hydrogen Peroxide, put some ointment on it, and bandaged it up. We’re hoping it’ll heal enough and the weather will cooperate enough for the planned trip to the Gold Coast and to the Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin’s zoo – the Crocodile Hunter). Christmas was great. With 11 people living in the house and 8 of them working, there were lots of presents.

The rest of this past week was mostly just sitting around listening to the rain. Wesley has done a good bit of hiking through the national forest across the street. Yesterday morning, before the horseback riding, I took Wesley and Jake for a one-hour hike through the rainforest at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was fun and beautiful, but most of the pictures somehow got deleted. One we did get is of Jake and Wesley together at a spot covered with boulders and a large, fallen tree, where they’ve climbed high above the trail where I stayed. One photo we lost was of a large loop of vine hanging down from a tree like a natural swing. Jake and I each got up in it and swung.

I’m including one more picture of the previous week’s trip to the Green Mountains, just for the fun of it. We have later, cooler photos of Jake with parrots, after he got used to it, but my title for this one when they first landed on him is: “Why Jake’s Not a Pirate”. You gotta love that boy.

By the way, the overwhelmingly-no-competition worst soft drink I ever tasted, a yogurt soda I bought several years ago at a Pakistani convenience store in Texas, now has competition. I bought it yesterday at a little sidewalk café at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was an Italian soft drink called, innocuously enough, a “carbonated citrus beverage.” The citrus fruit turned out to be something called chinotto, and it was unbelievably, shockingly awful. The only description I can think of is incredibly intense licorice.

Jake, who has a deeply held, life-long conviction against ever, ever trying any new food or beverage, jumped at the chance to try this soft-drink when I started spitting and saying how awful it was. Unfortunately, he agreed. But at least now I know what to say to get him to try something new. You can read about Chinotto on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinotto but don’t believe what it says about the taste.