Biking

Awaking to hot blue skies and a haze of sunshine, Alex and I partook of a tasty toast breakfast and then set about making ready to go cycling again. With the rucksack packed full of water bottles, we whipped on our helmets and jumped on the bikes and we were off.
We set ourselves a direction and headed that way with no particular goal in mind. We cycled down the coast in the direction of the Gold Coast for a while, enjoying the occasional rush of cool air as you sloped down a hill and perspiring through the heat on the upward slope.

After a good long while of following the cycle path in random twists and turns, and finding that most of them led onto dead ends, we decided that it might be better to turn back than risk getting lost somewhere in Queensland. So, we backtracked and started cycling back up the route we knew, towards Victoria Point jetty. We had in mind that there was a cafe nearby that we could stop at for sustinence, so on we cycled. It took longer than we remembered, it was definately hotter than before, but we made it without too much difficulty (the one difficulty being that I paid too much attention to a large, golden butterfly and fell off my bike when I careered off the pavement into the banked up edge - good thing I didn't go the other way, or I'd have fallen down onto the rocks lining the beach instead!)

Finally, gloriously, we made it through the heat of the day to the cafe and sat and drank cold gatorade from the chiller cabinet. Ah. Good stuff. Once our flagging electolytes were restored, we had some lunch and then went down towards to beach and sat in the shade watching the boats skim across the water around Coochie Mudlow. Of course, not too long after this, we had to start heading back if we wanted to make it home in time for dinner! So we hopped back on the bikes (ooof, muscle pain) and started peddling back.
We made it home, thouroughly exhausted and jumped in the shower to clear away the thought of exercise. The others were making Spaghetti Bolognaise for dinner, and Richard was kindly manufacturing an entirely different pasta sauce just for me and my vegetarian ways. We laid up the table and prepared to nosh! I sprinkled some of Richard's fresh garden chillies on my dinner and they surely pack a punch raw than cooked! Good stuff!
Instead of being outside on the patio, this time we were eating inside at the table usually reserved for dinner parties in order to avoid more mozzie bites and it seemed to inspire intense debate. We covered the spectrum of random dinner topics, from an in-depth look at the language of Afrikaans, to the issue of privacy on the internet. After a while, we moved to the sofas and watched baby Rhian gurgling at the camera as her parents tried to get a good passport shot of her. Eventually, the effort tired her out and the rest of us decided to retire to bed as well.