Last Day of Winter!!!

Awesome! I have had two last days of winter spent strapped into a snowboard in one year. Almost seems like a magic trick...I have been known to pull rabbits out of hats. I am in Jindabyne, NSW, a small mountain town on the south end of Lake Jindabyne. Staying with old mate Grover midweek and then for the weekend I couchsurfed with Becca on the other side of town. This is due to the fact that Grover does not pay rent and the people whose ski condo he lives at only come on the weekends. So to not impose I just act like a kid with divorced parents and go spend the weekend elsewhere. Got to snowboard 3 days so far, poached 2 and clipped a ticket in the carpark today as the weather was shitty and I knew people would be leaving early.

Ah, where has this past month taken me. About half the East coast of Australia, that's where. Pure hitch hiking at its finest, with public transport only paid for getting into and out of Sydney. It went like this :
From Moloolaba to Gold Coast for 7 out of 9 days of good to sick surf with the Ecuadorians. Surfing multiple sessions per day, eating, and chilling out on the leather backyard couch reading this weird but captivating Dostoyevsky book, "The Brothers Karamazov" (I'll review it when finished, its a long one). Surf videos were watched to stoke us out for the sessions...I didn't come out of any tubes but Henk and Ricky sure did, cabrones.
Left Goldy and hitched down the coast to Nambucca heads to couchsurf with my man Doug...an elder who is very young at heart and enjoys his "ciggys". An eclectic pack rat living in a sort of jimmy rigged museum with treasures everywhere, and a bird feeder instead of a television to watch. Nambucca was a beautiful natural spot on the coast at the mouth of the Nambucca river, with the town on one side and a nature preserve on the other. There was a few waves breaking in the rivermouth and a right point just north of it. I didn't surf as there was no equipment to borrow. Doug and I had an enjoyable barbecue in the park after the aboriginals were done using the public barbecue, yup, public, free barbecue...genius!!!
Cruised down the coast 2 days later with Sydney as my destination to visit my old friend Ernesto, who lives in Manly, a northern coastal suburb...The bummer here was that as I was hitch hiking I was starting to feel quite ill and knew that I had a virus spreading throughout my body. A fever had set in by the evening and I was feeling downright lousy. I spent the weekend in bed, just eating fruits, and taking some echinacea and vitamin C....By Monday I was full strength again. Manly was a suburb with a beach, which I only surfed once on one of Ernesto's boards. My springsuit was not warm enough for the winter water temps, and then the waves went flat, so I guess that was a good thing. Ernesto worked all week so I entertained myself by reading and walking and eating alot, things I am really good at!
Trained out of Sydney to the south a good ways so Id have a better chance of hitching with my final destination being Jindy. I took my time and really went with the flow. Spending one night at the windiest rest stop in history. The next night I was in the beautiful sleepy little coastal town of Tathra, where I camped out on the rocky headland just a few feet above sea level, and awoke to a warm sun.
I made it to Jindy by the late afternoon and proceeded to party hard with Grover at the Banjo Paterson Inn, and Wednesday night is payday for the whole town so it definitely gets crazy. Hungover altitude headache snowboarding ensued the next day. I got radical for sure, bro.

Quick note

Been reading "Songlines" by Bruce Chatwin. He is an English nomad and travel writer. This particular book is about a journey to Oz to learn about aboriginal songlines; their ancestral maps of the land that explain each clan's, or "dreaming's" history....interesting shit to say the least. He gets rained out for a brief period and is holed up in a caravan for ten days or so. He brought a stack of old travel notebooks with him to go through and he picks and packs some of the more useful points into the current book. This dude has been everywhere that any nomads have been, gnarly. He is just amused by man's instinctual desire to wander, the nature of human restlessness, as I. Here's a snippet from that section of the book"

"You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself" - Gautama Buddha

"Most of us, not being heroes, dawdle through life, mis-time our cues, and end up in our various emotional messes. The Hero does not. The Hero - and this is why we hail him as a hero - takes each ordeal as it comes, and chalks up point after point." - Bruce Chatwin

"Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death." - Pascal, Pensees

Karaoke night!

It is my self proclaimed last night in Mooloolaba.  Sitting here drinking some red lambrusco (fancy name for ten dollar four liter box wine a.k.a. goon) getting my vocal chords warm.  A quite relaxing beachy week has gone by.  Four out of six sunrises, slept in for the last two, because I could.  Mostly me, laying on the beach, reading Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines", people watching, surfer watching, meditating, soaking rays.  My sister and her colleagues (Team America) were busy working at their respective schools all week, and were only around in the evening.  I was breakfast and dinner cook for several delicious (not just self-proclaimed) meals.  Tonight was baked albacore with a veggie medley stewed in a tomato base.  Friday night found us getting saucy in the apartment before heading out to Vibes for the dance fest.  I made it in under the radar of the flip flop police, and proceeded to get my feet extra dirty/sticky.  I love being a keen social observer, on a budget.  I did not drop a dime at the bar, but I did pick up a twenty cent piece on the way out.  Saturday night was mellow as I had absorbed entirely too much sun.  Melted into the couch and watched "Michael Clayton" with George Clooney.  it was just barely good enough to keep me awake but leave me nice and sleepy at the end.  As far as waves go, ha, I got on my sister's rented boogie board and got totally rad in some dribbly little shorebreak.  Today, however, homeboy aaron (one of the teachers), had fenagled a seven foot log from one of his faculty.  I'll give him credit, he gave it his all, managed to get into a few, just not stand up.  I patiently awaited my turn and was rewarded handsomely.  Now, I am not the keenest on longboards, but when you travel as light as me you must chameleon what you can get.  I groveled around for a bit, dropping in here and there, getting my groove back like Stella.  Finally, I got on a fun little cruisy left and did a longboard-ish off the lip finish.  Thats it, thats all I needed.  Stoked I be mate!  Lucky for me, Aaron has to work all day tomorrow so my plan is to surf until my arms fall off in the morning, because I am fiending, that's why!  Post surf tomorrow I am loading up and heading out.  Destination Gold Coast to stay with Henk de Bruin, my mate from the 2003 Goldie days.  Right now tho, which is the only moment I am concerned with, is hokey pokey karaoke time!