Palm Cove Sunday 3/23/08

Happy Easter. Easter in the late summer is a new thing for us but the weather is sunny and bright this morning so looking out the window it feels like it could be a nice spring day. After our fulfilling our Easter obligations we have a big brekkie with a bunch of fresh fruit and eggs with avocados and kransky sausages. The Easter Bunny has left nothing but he probably did not get the itinerary we had sent. We’re sure there must be a couple chocolate eggs in Pine River. In another Easter thought an Imam in Indonesia has asked all the true believers to rise up and use this occasion to kill all the Western Tourist Maggots on holiday in Bali. So far he has been ignored so we can only hope that this level of hatred is wearing thin among the Muslim community.

We do a leisurely stroll through Palm Cove late morning poking around in all the little shops that are amazingly open today and book a beachside table for our "last supper" on Tuesday night. We finish on the pier at the opposite end of town that is filled with families fishing off the sides. We watch dozens of lines in the water but see only one little fish pulled in. You can see that the "regulars" are barely tolerating the influx of blow-ins. As we walk back along the beach all of the public barbies in thre picnic area along the beach are loaded with shrimp, steaks, sausages and other goodies for all of the families gathered there. This is a 4-day holiday weekend for everyone in Australia (except the people working in the shops here) and shrimp on the barbie is the ultimate Easter dinner. This is also the semi-official end of summer holiday and joins Christmas and New Years as one of the big summer blow-outs. At the resort where we stopped for breakfast on Thursday they are setting up for a wedding near the beach with another room being prepared for what we assume will be the reception. Easter Sunday wedding? Why not.

That's it for today. We have no plans and after eating some leftovers we spend the rest of the afternoon reading, watching a little tennis and footy on the telly and napping. We were tempted to do that by the pool but it is again muggy, the pool is crowded today and the apartment is air-conditioned. No contest. We are cooking by the pool tonight and whenever we go out after dark something moves off the sidewalk in front of us with every step we take. They are little geckos and big toads that apparently like the heat retained in the walkways and we force them to scurry into the shrubs when we pass. Like walkng through water they fill in right behind us again as we pass. The barbies are busy for dinner tonight and we have a combo of Tasmanian salmon and garlic shrimp skewers that we toss on the grill while another bloke does mushrooms on the griddle portion of the same cooker. He is from down near Melbourne and is here for the week to attend one of his mate's wedding on Wednesday. The wedding will be on one of the neighboring islands and all of the guests will be yachted to the ceremony. We are impressed and it sounds like he is too.

We have an assortment of deli salads to go with our "traditional" Easter dinner and a really good bottle of Shiraz. We watch a special one-hour Easter addition of "the Vicar of Walpole" that takes up the half hour normally allotted to "Kath & Kim" so we are mildly disappointed. Then we catch the footy and rugger scores on the news before bed. How Aussie are we?

Today's local healdine: Holy Croc! Cairns Post (A 3-meter (10-foot) croc, that observers had initially thought was a very big log, had found his way inside the stinger nets at the Trinity Beach swimming area . This is a couple miles down the shore from us.)