Thursday, March 22
6:00 am Ballina, NSW, Australia
19 C forecast high 26 C with some showers
6:30 am Life
The sound of the birds is truly delightful as the light begins. We will be sitting on our balcony in a few minutes with a fresh cup of coffee (Caddies coffee) and a bowl of fresh fruit. We are rapidly getting ourselves settled.
The fridge is very small and a challenge to figure out how to put much food (and beer & white wine) in it. The manager was able to locate a microwave and so we now can heat some things in it. Life is good.
10:00 am Geocaching
We walked about a kilometer to a cache site along the Richmond River. This one gave me some difficulty but I finally found the container hidden under a flat rock.
- GC1MZ59 - RiverView
This completed my searching for March 22. All three finds that I have logged so far have been set out by the same person.
11:30 am Birding
Here is a list of the birds we saw while walking to the geocache:
- Spotted Turtle-Dove
- Little Black Cormorant (first for 2012)
- Welcome Swallow
- Pied Cormorant (first for 2012)
- Magpie-lark (first for 2012)
- Willie Wagtail (first for 2012)
- Osprey (first for 2012)
- Australian White Ibis
- Masked Lapwing
- Australian Wood Duck (first for 2012)
- Brahminy Kite
- Crested Tern
- Eastern Rosella (first for 2012)
- House Sparrow (first for 2012).
Pied Cormorant
Welcome Swallow
Masked Lapwing & Australian Wood Ducks
This brings our totals for this trip to 30 different birds, with 3 of them being lifers. The total number of different birds we have identified on all our Australian visits remains at 198. Our hope is to make it to 200. And it would be nice to log an Emu as a lifer.
4:00 PM Life
The weather has remained overcast with intermittent showers all day. We focused on trying out a new fish & chips shop only a short walk from our unit. This was actually the same location (and even decor) of one of our favorite spots about a decade ago, but which had closed shop. We have now tried 2 shops from the Ballina CBD and liked them both, with a slight preference for the one we visited today.
Frangipani blossoms
Earlier in the day, we had our first cappuccino at Pelican 181. It was still first-rate! Later in the afternoon we visited a new coffee shop and bought some Toby's Estate coffee which was recommended to us by our friends.
Cappuccino at Pelican 181
A bottle of red with some Costello Blue cheese on some Vita-Wheat crackers made for a relaxing afternoon. This cheese is not available in Canada because it is not pasteurized. Pity.