What A Difference A Week Makes

The photos above were taken last Sunday on my walk. The news had said that the southern swells and Spring high tides earlier in the week had caused major erosion of my local Merewether beach not seen in our area since a major storm in 1974. The 1974 storm was locally known as the Sygna storm after the Norwegian bulk carrier of the same name that ran aground on Stockton beach at the time. I was fascinated to see what everyone was talking about. Wow! I wasn’t expecting what I saw. It didn’t even occur to me that there were rocks under the sand. All the media reports about the erosion stated that history had proved that the sand would return by summer. The swells and the tides would put it all back again. No intervention needed.

While I had no evidence to go by I just trusted mother nature and didn’t think any more about it. Today on our lockdown walk as we had nothing else to do we thought we’d go back to Merewether and see what was happening. We were gob smacked. Merewether beach was back and beautiful. The photos below were taken this morning. They are from similar spots and of the same stretch of beach that was stripped bare last Sunday. We were also surprised to note that there seemed to be even more sand on the beach than before. It was also clean and yellow. Merewether beach had been Spring cleaned at no cost.

Thanks to Natalie for hosting #weekendcoffeeshare


Newcastle Window Wander

This week again we will be having takeaway coffee as New South Wales remains in lockdown. As we cannot have visitors to our homes or most shops we will take a walk with purpose. Today we will be exploring the Newcastle Window Wander. A group of local businesses have gathered together to increase their shops profile while closed and at the same time give locals something to look at during their daily exercise. The idea is to follow the map, look at the specially created window displays, take a selfie, upload it the social media and then go in the draw to win a gift voucher.

Today was a beautiful day for walking with Spring just around the corner. It was interesting to go walking with the specific goal of looking in shop windows. What surprised me was that I don’t really notice what is in the windows when I walk. As I followed the map I found most of the window displays. On 3 occasions I was so impressed I will go back to the shops when they reopen. Unfortunately being window displays they were hard to photo graph without something being reflected in the glass.

I smiled at the first window I saw that used humour to catch our attention. They created a “shitty” birthday cake made out of toilet paper rolls.

The next shop a few doors down in Darby Street was a men’s wear store that I didn’t know existed and they keep my husband’s favourite John Lennon brand shirts. I loved the one in the window.

Some were a little bit clever.

The birds at the gallery were spectacular. They were amazing replicas of some of our iconic birds. Unfortunately, due to the doors breaking the line of vision my photos don’t do them justice.

The last stop on our journey was Pappa Sven. I have walked past this small shop many times but never looked inside or at the windows. It is a Swedish shop and looks amazing. They had created their window display to represent celebrating the joy of Swedish Midsummer.