Our friend Pat let us stay in her cottage for a week on Jervis Bay around Christmas time. Jervis Bay is a beautiful beach-front area two hours south of Wollongong. Pat's cottage is on one of the shorelines of the Bay in a small community. We were surprised to see some wallabies on the front lawn as we pulled up. This was a good sign that we were in for a real "Aussi" week.

We spent each day at Hyam's Beach, supposedly sporting the 'whitest sand in the world'. The surf was wild and the older boys got in some serious body-boarding. Back at the cottage in the afternoons, the pelicans would come and land on the dock and give us a treat of these huge birds up close. The beach at the cottage was excellent and the water is very shallow in the Bay for quite a ways off shore so the boys had a great place to frollick on their boards and look for 'critters'. We took walks through the rain forest that hugs the shoreline near the beach and saw lots of lovely birds and flowers. The silouetted bird in the tree below is a Kookaburra. As you'll see near the bottom, the Huntsman Spiders gave us a number of shows (and scares!) and a few Wombats made us jump one evening as they perched on the cottage poach. "No worries, mate!"