Christmas and Boxing Day.

Christmas Eve, in our neighborhood. Nice and quiet, though they forgot to plug in the lights around the palm tree in our local roundabout:

 

It actually was a "white Christmas" - well, at least for a few minutes. There was a pretty heavy storm all day, including lots of rain and hail! We managed to avoid the worst of it while driving, though:

Christmas Day Evening, in our backyard. A fantastic sunset after the storm.

Notice how the above sunset photo has really intense colors? We discovered some new settings on our camera. On Boxing Day (for Americans: the day after Christmas), we took a day trip to the south coast near Melbourne. There, we tried a particularly 'cool' setting on ourselves, by accident:

The area we went to is called Cape Schank, which is part of a state park on the south side - ocean side - of Mornington Peninsula (which defines part of the bay Melbourne is built by). We turned off the 'cool' setting for the rest of our walking around. Under cloudy skies, we took a trail that went along the coast for about 3k, through some light forest:

Our progress was observed by some of the locals (we think there might be some old Aussie song about magpies sitting on a fence post....if not, this picture seems to lend itself to one):

The other wildlife we witnessed included lots of butterflies - which were unfortunately very difficult to photograph - and some strange-looking giant 'ants.'

Then, at the end of the trail was a beach! The clouds even started to part while we were there.

At the other end of the trail was a boardwalk that went down to a different spot along the water. Dramatic colours came from layers of volcanic rock - notice especially the black rocks like on the other beach and just how blue the water was. It really was that color blue:

The basalt layer formed a bunch of tidepools. We spent a while looked down at some of the residents, and taking blurry photos. Here's a blue seastar, which was casually crawling along:

The Australians take their holidays very seriously. We think that because Christmas is in the summer, and really marks the start of summer vacation for school-kids it has a certain importance it doesn't quite have in the US. It also means that Naomi has off from work this whole week. So, that meant that we started moving to our new apartment today. There are a bunch of things to do to get fully moved, but we should have it all done in time to relax on the beach for New Years'...