There was great excitement locally this week as the Queen Elizabeth was scheduled to arrive in Newcastle on Monday morning. Cruise liners do not usually visit Newcastle, there is no passenger terminal and the city docks are all dedicated to coal ships which come from all over the world to load up. 
Newcastle is about 40 minutes by car from us or a twenty minute drive then 5 minutes on the ferry, so we planned to watch from the ferry terminal. The ship was due to arrive at 7.15 am so we got up at a sparrow's fart, loaded up our bikes and arrived in plenty of time. There was quite a crowd gathering by the time we got there and several coal ships were being dragged out to sea by tugs in a mad scramble to get on their way before the Queen Elizabeth pulled in and blocked the entrance to the harbour for an hour or so.
Bang on time she came out of the sunrise into view. The gun at Fort Scratchley fired three times in salute as she rounded the lighthouse and headed into the docks. Because she is so huge, the ship had to complete a 180 degree turn right in front of the watching crowd before being backed into her dock for the day. It was pretty spectacular and well worth the early start,  when the ship was sideways on it became clear just how little room there was to spare and, if you look in the corner of the photo, you will see there was even a kangaroo joey watching the proceedings and taking pictures with his phone.

The visit was part of a four month world tour for the passengers and there was a little ceremony after to commemorate the original Queen Elizabeth carrying Australian service personnel during the Second World War. There is talk of building a cruise ship terminal in Newcastle which would be great for employment and the local economy if it went ahead.
We caught the ferry across and cycled around the headland after. The beaches in Newcastle are sensational and Surfest was beginning there this week, last year the event was badly disrupted by shark sightings but there has been nothing like that so far this time. As we cycled over the Anzac bridge a milestone was reached as Ian's bike display reached 1000km (I have only done 965), we have nearly cycled the equivalent distance to visiting Zoe in Melbourne!

A much bigger celebration was in order at the end of this week though as we laid the last concrete slab in our path and can finally get ourselves and our bikes in and out without scrambling up and down the grassy slope.

Our day on the Tilligerry Habitat volunteers rota is Sunday and it comes as a bit of a relief at the moment as it makes us take a break from the, seemingly endless, concreting. We try to arrive about an hour before we have to open up so we can have a good look around for any koalas because it is good to be able to direct visitors to where they should see one, they are very tricky to find but Ian has got pretty good at spotting them. We were out of luck this weekend but the following day,while at the Habitat again doing some work on their website, Ian phoned me to say there were two koalas there and to bring my camera.
Two koalas together is a bit of a treat and when I arrived we went to find them. We were happily taking a few pictures of a very handsome koala and his lady friend when we heard a third koala in the bush. Koalas make a terrible grunting noise which cannot be mistaken for anything else and the male heard it at the same time as us (you can tell he is a male by the dark scent gland in the middle of his chest which he uses to mark trees). Bull koalas keep about a kilometre distance from each other and don't take too kindly to other males encroaching on their patch so he climbed down the tree and set off to see if this was a female to make friends with, or a male, in which case a scrap was on the cards. 
There are loads of beautiful walks around our home and we are still finding new ones. Last week we stumbled upon yet another path and followed it as it took us along a fire trail (a manmade track cut in the trees to be used as access by the firefighters in the event of a bushfire) and past some ponds. It was a very hot day so we did not see as many birds as we would expect to and turned back because Monty was starting to complain. On our return journey we sat and had a beer in a picnic shelter overlooking the spot where a ferry used to run from our town across the bay to Nelson Bay. This is only a couple of kilometres by sea but a forty minute drive by road. The ferry was destroyed in a storm about a year before we moved here and there is no sign of a replacement.

Australia is all about outdoor living and they seem to think of everything, the shelter we were taking a rest in was specially deigned for wheelchair users, what a nice touch.

The Rabbitts have acquired a new skill over the last couple of weeks, concreting!
We use our bikes all the time now, only taking the car out if we are travelling further than our peninsula, collecting something heavy or if it is raining but the bikes have to be dragged up a very steep grassy hill from under the house to the street. Ian has made it so we have a flat walking entrance from the street into the house but getting the bikes out every day has been a bit of a challenge. So, Ian came up with the idea of building a bike shed halfway up the hill with a concrete path so we can ride them up to and down from the street. I was also getting tired of mowing Everest every week so agreed to give it a go if only to get rid of some of the grass.
Being British, we chose the height of summer when the days are generally 30 degrees to carry out this project and, after many hours watching 'How to Concrete' videos on youtube, we decided we couldn't put it off any longer and marked out the area for the first slab.
All the 'How to' videos were at pains to stress one thing, concreting is a two person job and very hard work, add into the mix that one of those people is a woman in her fifties who doesn't really want to do it and you will get an idea of what might happen. However, we bit the bullet and set up the cement mixer we bought months ago and have been too scared to use. Moving the mixer about on a sheer slope is terrifying as it is incredibly heavy and has become one of the more challenging parts of the job and the one that does not seem to get much easier. 
Eventually we worked out our roles and set to. The first couple of slabs were hair raising as we did not know what to expect, how sloppy to make the concrete mix, whether it would set too quickly for us to keep up, how many mixerfuls would fill the area, what to do if the cement mixer took off down the hill full of concrete. After a couple of slabs we seem to have got the hang of it and, for the last couple of weeks our days have settled down to a regular pattern of cycling to the pool for a swim in the morning and then laying a concrete slab in the afternoon and we have nearly reached the spot where the shed will go. Although it is still hard labour, it isn't as bad as we expected it to be. Australians are friendly folk on the whole and everyone stops to give us words of encouragement even though they are clearly amused and wonder what on earth we are going to attempt next, yesterday our neighbour even came across with two cold beers for us when the temperature reached sweltering point.