ANZAC Day - Dawn Service

This year I again went to the Anzac Day dawn service.

It was easier than I thought to get up at 4:20am.  I went with Di and Donna (our neighbours) leaving Karyn and Matt in still in bed.  No way can you get Karyn up early.

As we approached the War Memorial we took seemingly random turns looking for parking, only to end up exactly where we parked last year.  We walked up to the cenotaph with a thousand other people only to find many thousands already there.  I'm not certain of my ability to estimate crowds of people, but I reckon there must have been over 6,000 people there.

When the official party arrived, they made no fuss about the presence of the Prime Minister, which was good. It's not a time for politicians.  After all, aren't they the ones who get us into wars in the first place?

It was a very simple ceremony, but we reflected afterwoods that there we didn't like the hymns they selected this year.  Maybe hymns are less relevant these days.

The ceremony lasted about 30 minutes and then ended.  We walked up to the volunteer tea/coffee stalls, but they'd run out of coffee and only had soy milk left.  So we had to wander around until we found one with coffee and real milk.

We then had an early breakfast at Pizazz at Kingston before coming home.

Away for Easter - but not on holiday

Today we drove up to Port Stephens to stay at the mother-in-law's.

The traffic was pretty good until we reached Sydney and got onto Pennant Hills Road where it became bumper-to-bumper. We picked-up Jessica at Hornsby and headed up to Newcastle.  The expressway was busy, but flowed well.  As usual there were the usual hoons who felt the need to tailgate and zoom in and out of lanes.

When we arrived it appeared that there's a big list of things for me to do.  It seems like my days up here are fully planned out for me.

Here's where we had lunch on Sunday.