Ced ‘n Avril’s

18 August 2009

Hey there dudes and dudettes

Well it’s been a long time since we have done a travel blog so I wish I had a better story to write about, but I’m currently sitting in a freezing cold crummy motel in Invercargill which is a town at the absolute arse-end bottom of New Zealand just across the water from Antarctica.

Invercargill is apparently famous for a dude who set the land speed record in the 60’s of which there was a recent Anthony Hopkins movie about it called “The World’s Fastest Indian”…

However, I’m here because poor Avril has fractured her upper arm into about 4 pieces in a nasty snowboarding accident and Invercargill has the only orthopaedic ward in the area, so she’s currently in theatre and we are waiting to hear whether she will get a metal plate put in!

Oh man… we only flew to New Zealand 3 days ago to go snowboarding with our friends Andrew, Dom and Dee in Queenstown… and so far absolutely friggin EVERYTHING has gone wrong!!! Read the rest of this entry »

20/5/09

Hey guys

Today Brisbane had the worst storms in 100 years and the worst flooding since 1974.

Anyway, I bragged last year about our place being spared by a flood but we’ve just gone underwater so I jinxed myself.

I got home at 3.30pm after a street near work got flooded. By 5pm we were underwater.

Avril had just built a new glass studio downstairs so it is especially heartbreaking since we had just finished it.

Thanks to Andrew Goode and Dom who brought a heap of guys from her work, we were able to get most valuables upstairs. Thanks heaps guys… we owe you. You guys ROCK!!!!

However there is more flooding expected in the next 48 hours so we are going to have a nervous nights sleep tonight since high tide is at 6am tomorrow.

Power and internet are back on so we have uploaded some photos at this link which go in chronological order.

Cheers
Ced & Avril

PS Wish us luck

22/11/08

Hey there dudes and dudettes

So a few years ago when we were doing renovations, we decided to build some retaining walls and raise up our land, which I remember at the time was VERY expensive and we had ummmed and ahhhhed about whether it was worth it or not…

Well… HOLY CRAP and FRIGGIN HELL… thank friggin god we did, since this whole last week Brisbane has been hit by the worst storms on record since 1974!!!

Man… Basically, one entire suburb was destroyed and there has been a lot of flooding around the city… And of course since we have parkland and a creek out the back of our place, we’ve been very nervous about flooding since our place last flooded in 1993.

Anyhows check out these photos of the flooding at our house.

http://www.cedavril.com/photos/#album=brisbane-storms-2008

The first 2 photos are what our back yard normally looks like, and the rest are from the flood.

You’ll see that basically our little island is surrounded by flood waters and ALL of our neighbours got flooded except us.

Man… higher topography ROCKS!!!

Anyways, for those of you who haven’t seen this clip, this youtube link has been going around the web and is a great bit of footage from inside the storm showing how severe it was. The real bit of storm happens about half way into the clip.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=skrnDGl1LxQ

Anyhows, there are more storms due tonight so we’re off to batten down the hatches. Hopefully we haven’t jinxed ourselves by sending out this blog… but we’ll let you know if we do get flooded tonight.

Floody Hell
Ced & Avril

5/4/08

Gruss Gott to all you snow bunnies and wacko spackos

Well, we are currently in Innsbruck, Austria which is the famous winter Olympics town in the Austrian Tyrolean Alps, and yesterday in the ski village of Kuttai, I had one of the most spastic, lamearse, limb threatening snowboarding accidents EVER!!!

Now I had always imagined that my first ever limb threatening snowboard accident would be this TOTALLY AWESOME snowboard jump off a 200m cliff over 7 helicopters… while dodging KGB hitmen on snowmobiles AND outrunning an avalanche!!!

However, all my romantic dreams of having an amazing snowboard stack were COMPLETELY trashed when… Holy cow… I …er… um… simply fell 3m off a chairlift… flat on my face!!!

….FECK!!!!!!!!

Now for those of you who have never snowboarded, basically you get on a chairlift with your left foot strapped in on the front binder of the board, while your right back foot just dangles free.

Then as you are approaching the get off area, you need to angle your body sideways to get the board pointing straight ahead with your left foot forward and your right butt sitting on the chair so you can simply slide off the chair when you arrive… and of course you need to hold onto something so that you don’t topple off. Read the rest of this entry »

2/4/08

…2 John’s 1 Cup…

Gruss Gott to all you movers, groovers and other furry animals

Well I am currently in sitting in a crappy hotel in Munich in a cranky pants mood since today we rented a car to drive through the Bavarian Alps to go up to Zugspitze the highest mountain in Germany… but all we saw for 8 hours was the inside of a FRIGGIN cloud!!! In fact, we were driving through the Alps for most of the time and didn’t even know it since the visibility was so fecking s’hitty… FECK!!!

And the thing that p’isses me off the most, is that it’s been like this for the last 3 weeks that we have been in Europe… and doesn’t look like it will clear anytime soon!!! …AAAAAAARGH!!! F’ECKIN European weather…!!!

Anyways, I’ve been on an Eastern European road trip for the last week and a bit, with 2 mates JC and Greco, and we’ve been travelling from Poland to Berlin via Slovakia, Budapest, Dresden and Prague… And honestly, the weather has been so friggin AWFUL, that it has seriously ruined what could have been a great holiday!!!

Now as most of you know, one of my many superpowers is to whinge and complain like a cranky old man, and yet be as immature as a 12 year old kid… But fortunately I have been travelling with 2 mates who totally put me to shame…

JC was probably born a cranky old man, or bitten by a radioactive cranky old man or some s’hit like that… and hence he has whinging superpowers by far greater than my own… And then there is Greco who has the amazing superpower to come up with immature toilet humour in any given situation but due to having congenital cranky bowel syndrome, every joke comes out as a scratch and sniff variety…

So even though the weather has been sh’ite we’ve basically b’itched, moaned, complained, p’erved, giggled and f’arted our way across Eastern Europe… which actually has been fun!!! In fact I’ve never had so much fun whinging and complaining… which is why instead of writing a nice travel blog, I’m totally going to have a moan! Read the rest of this entry »

23/3/08

Dzien Dobry and Wisowy Swiat (happy easter) to all you Polish sausages and Sour Krauts

Well, as a completely rude shock to the system after bumming around stinking hot Africa last week, I am currently on a Eastern European road trip with 2 mates John Greco and John Cebula, and freezing my nads off in a ski lodge in the Tatra mountains above Zakopane in Southern Poland, since Avril left on a plane to Venice a couple of days ago…

Now it is certainly beautiful outside as we have hit an unprecedented patch of snowy weather that doesn’t normally occur this late in the season… but the fact that we are 3 guys who don’t ski, staying in a snowy mountain ski lodge with the only food in the place being frozen bananas and Colgate toothpaste… Well that’s just a little bit TOO Brokeback Mountain for me!!!

And the fact that very soon after getting lost for 2 hours while trying to drive a Ford Mondeo up the ski slopes, the conversation turned to whether you can survive in the snow by eating your own s’emen… probably suggests that if you don’t want to read about men behaving badly… you should probably stop reading this blog NOW!!! Read the rest of this entry »