Sunny And Sensible

Cloudy And Stupid

Hey there dudes and dudettes.

Well I’m currently in Queenstown in New Zealand with a mate of mine, Darren… and normally I’d be sending a travel blog out about how awesome a snowboarding trip I’m having since there have been a couple of major snow dumps over the week I’ve been here…

…and i’d probably be bragging that I’ve managed to snowboard my first powder runs with amazingly good weather over here…

…however…

This time I’ll let the attached photos speak for themselves… You Have Been Warned! What has been seen CANNOT be unseen! Proceed to the other photos with caution!

Ladies & Gentlemen… Welcome to Ced’s Mankini Snowboard Run on Treblecone 2010…

The photos are here…

You Have Been Warned! What has been seen CANNOT be unseen! Proceed to the other photos with caution!

Ok don’t try this at home unless you have buns of steel. I had frozen dangleberries for hours afterwards.

OK girls put your vibrators down and step slowly away from the computer and nobody will get hurt. Don’t go zooming in. There’s nothing to see. It was very VERY cold. But I bet you are all jealous of Avril getting all this mankini loving!

Holy shit. That’s a long way down skidding on my arse if I fuck this up.

Ah… fuck it here we go!!! By the way, this was a black run called the drainpipe. I have balls of ice and a brown patch where my green patch should be.

…and the video is here…

Lotsa love
Ced

PS …and before anyone rags me out on riding the brakes on the video… that was a black run and until they invent arse transplants… i’m not going any faster than that in a mankini… i’ve already got a brown spot where my green spot should be

Hey there dudes and dudettes

Well it’s been a while since we’ve done a travel blog, and it’s rare that we do a travel blog about a short trip especially at home in Australia… but HOLY COW we’ve just been swimming with whale sharks in Western Australia… and we wanted to blog about it because… it was TOTALLY FRIGGIN AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!

A few days ago we rented a campervan and drove the 1300km north from Perth to the Ningaloo Reef where the whale sharks come to feed from April to July.

Now we’d heard about this some years ago from Axel, a German backpacker friend, who like all backpackers, has seen and knows much more about Australia than we will ever know… and since he had worked as a cameraman for the same company that we went with, we managed to watch some video that he had done… and it looked really REALLY easy to go snorkelling with these bigarsed whale sharks.

The whale sharks, which by the way are the biggest fish in the world growing up to 13m in length, just seem to glide slowly and effortlessly just under the surface of the water, so you can simply just snorkel with them… and after seeing the footage, we thought to ourselves …gee… that looks piss easy!

Well, we were wrong!

Holy Cow it was mother friggin HARD!!!!

Man… those darn bigarsed whale sharks are fast motherfeckers!!!

Basically you are out in open water, and the day we went, we had freezing cold winds and big swells that were so bad that I actually got seasick while swimming. One poor German girl even started throwing up in the water.

Not only that, but the waves were so big that even our snorkels would take in water… which basically brought us to the realisation that although Ced and Avril have been blessed with many superpowers… open water swimming was not one of them… We SUCKED!!!

Now only 10 people can be in the water with the sharks at any one time, so the boat does try and make it easier on you by dumping you in front of the whale shark hoping it will swim towards you to make it easier to see it… but as soon as it passes, you have to swim your friggin heart out just to keep up with it.

Poor Avril was such a lamearse though, that as soon as she jumped in and saw the whale shark swimming towards her with its big open mouth, she got so excited that she couldn’t breathe so there was no way she could keep up with it…

And of course me being quite caring and nurturing, then proceeded to pay out on her for the rest of the trip… while hiding the fact that I also freaked out and squealed like a little girl…er… until I almost vomited into my snorkel…. Hmm… snorkel vomit… yum….

So anyway, despite all that, it was TOTALLY awesome and one of the best animal adventures that we have ever done! …although next time we do it, we’ll definitely go earlier in the season so it isn’t as cold and get much fitter as well!

So, now we are currently sunning our toes while lying in a campervan looking out at the beautiful turquoise waters of the Ningaloo Reef in the Cape Range National Park, which we actually think is much more beautiful and much more accessible than the Great Barrier Reef.

Up here you can literally camp next to the beach and then wander out into pristine coral reef right on the shore line which is fantastic!

In fact we’d often heard from overseas travellers that Western Australia is their most favourite part of Australia, and now after being here, we can see why.

The drive up here was across vast open red rock plains bordered by beautiful turquoise waters, and we’ve seen more kangaroos, wallabies, emus and echidnas up here than we have ever seen in living in Queensland… In fact the kangaroos are as common as pidgeons up here and are probably only outnumbered by the sheer number of grey nomads. (grey nomads are retired couples travelling around Australia in bigarsed campervans for all you non-aussies).

um… although there were a lot of dead kangaroos too, and our American friends Ralf & Janelle who we were travelling with, have now claimed their Australian citizenship by hitting their first kangaroo and seeing another one explode in front of them after being hit by an oncoming 4wd. No dead grey nomads were seen unfortunately.

Anyways, we’re going to chill out up here for another day and then mosey back down to Perth over the next few days before heading home on the weekend.

Gotta say, we’ve got the travel bug again so we’re now thinking Japan and North Korea later this year.

See ya

Snail Shark Ced
Hyperventilating in hyperspace Avril

PS. If you are bored, our whale shark photos are at this link.
And we’ve uploaded our video footage at this link… which also includes footage of the whale shark that we were swimming with… actually coughing!!! Apparently they cough to clear out their gills… probably from inhaling seasick backpacker chunder…

PPS If anyone is interested in going one day, the company we went with was Ningaloo Reef Dreaming which we would totally recommend. You only get 1 hour with the whale sharks and they have their own spotter plane to maximise the time you get. The other companies share a plane so have to share the time with other boats. They also donate a lot of money to whale shark research. Cost was $360 pp.

If you want to read the above cartoon, then just click on the image

Hey there movers and groovers

Happy Easter!!!!

Well it’s been 2 years since our last xmas cartoon, and it’s ridiculously late… but here it is! Our new xmas 2009 cartoon! YAY!!!

It pretty much sums up our life over the last year, so I’ll let the cartoon speak for itself, but here are some links to other stuff in our lives right now.

As you all probably know, Avril’s been going great guns with her beading and is now doing jewelery design.

Her website is at www.avrilbowie.com

And her flickr site with her bead pics is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/heartofglassbeads/

And if you are interested in any beads or jewelery, her etsy shop is at http://avrilbowie.etsy.com but you can also contact her directly.

Avril is also on facebook if anyone isn’t already friended there http://www.facebook.com/avril.bowie

Ced on the otherhand is more old school and refuses to ever join facebook, buy an iphone, or own an ipod so all his artwork is on www.cedavril.com

Ced also did a really cool 7 day trek on the famous Overland Track in Tasmania at the start of 2009, so if you’re bored, the link to the pics are here.

Also, we’ve been really slack at sorting our photos this year, so if we went to a party or a function with anyone and promised you a copy of the pics, but never delivered… here they are.

2009 pics
2010 pics

I’ve tried to sort through to weed out all the nude, crude, and rude photos, but as most of our friends are drunken exhibitionists, please let me know if you find an incriminating pics of yourself and want them taken down.

Anyways, hope everyone has an awesome Easter. We were pretty slack at keeping in touch last year, and can pretty much promise, we’ll be exactly the same again this year… but we would still love to hear from you all!

Lots gooshyness and smooshyness

Ced
Avril

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!!!

First our 1 hour Jetstar flight from Christchurch to Queenstown was cancelled due to fog, but instead of flying us to Dunedin and then busing us from there, they put us on a shitty 7 hour bus ride instead… Tossers…

Then the bus stops at a pitstop where I step in someone’s vomit in the toilet and then bring the smell back on the bus with me…

THEN the bus stops in some horrid diner in the middle of friggin nowhere and for some god forsaken fecked up reason I decide to eat the pale looking fish and chips that they were giving us for free… which then promptly gave me stomach pain enough to double me up for the rest of the trip…

Which THEN meant that when the bus eventually pulled up to the airport, I didn’t get off to check our luggage, which is what I normally do…

… So of course I didn’t notice that some fuckwit had taken our snowboards off the bus and then left then on the ground while our bus sped off to drop us at our hotels.

And of course the snowboards then went missing for 2 days and no one knew where they were because the dumbarsed feckin tossers who found them handed them into a rental car company instead of Jetstar despite all the luggage labels and contact details on the case… and of course the rental car company didn’t tell anyone that they had them!!!!!

So eventually when we did find them, we managed to only have one nice day of snowboarding until on the very last run Avril falls on her left arm and breaks her upper arm humerus bone!!!

…FUCK!!!!!

Now for all you non-medical people, humerus fractures are NOT very humourous and are definitely very painful, but can often be treated conservatively with a sling… However, when the first aid people picked her off the slopes, they noticed that her shoulder was quite deformed and that she had a very unusual dimple in the front of her shoulder like a bit of flesh was caught in the fracture.

Well Queenstown, despite being a major snowsports area, doesn’t have an ortho department or a CT so she needed to be transferred to Invercargill which is 2.5 hours away on a windy road… And OF COURSE there wasn’t enough room in the ambulance as there were 3 other people needing to be transferred, so we had to drive her ourselves… but because she wasn’t in the ambulance they only gave her very scant pain relief which was really fucked!

And then despite how much pain she was in, we had to wait in a public waiting room for 3 hours to be seen… with some SERIOUSLY festy mong looking people… which was SHIT, but I think we probably couldn’t complain since apparently the hospital in the past had to put patients into rented buses in the carpark when they were overfilled!!!

Anyways, after the orthopaedic reg had finished taking pictures of Avril’s VERY unusual looking arm with his I-phone he worked out that it was likely that her pectoralis muscle was caught in the fracture and hence why she is in theatre right now getting her fracture pulled apart to free up her muscle.

So basically this is turning out to be a SH’IT holiday!!! …NOT very choice BRO!!!

I’ll email again when I know more.

Cheers
Pissed Off - Off Piste Ced

PS. OK we have just heard that when they gave Avril the anaesthetic apparently her muscle must have relaxed and it’s popped out of the fracture on it’s own… so she doesn’t need any surgery… YAY!!!

PPS. I’ve now attached photos of Avril’s deformed shoulder and really cool CT and xray image… You can see on the photo of her arm how the skin is tethered into the fracture and on the CT you can see the sharp bit of bone that caught the muscle as well… YEE-OUCH!!! She’s doing OK now though, and the pain is much better now that the muscle is free.

PPS. OK that’s a really p.issed off negative blog that I just wrote, so to cheer you all up, here is a link to a music dance clip that Avril and I did a few weeks ago for our friend Dom’s 40th vampire birthday
party.
It’s one of the most amazingly choreographed pieces of dance that you will
ever see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQH2G-8COJM

PPPS Thanks to Alok my orthopaedic friend for all the phone advice… It really was a very stressful time the last couple of days and it’s times like this I am so appreciative to belong to the medical fraternity. And also
thanks to Dee for driving us around and doing so much organising while I was sitting at the hospital with Avril and couldn’t leave. Thanks guys… You ROCK!!!

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

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