Sydney in springtime is wonderful, if you enjoy variety. This week we covered the middle of summer and the middle of winter, all in a few days.
Last Sunday we moved from our St Ives house-sit to a serviced apartment for a short term rental.
(Most people, on hearing that we are house-sitters, ask the question “What do you do when there’s a gap?” Now you have the answer.)
The day we moved was one of the hottest since last summer (just perfect for shlepping boxes).
The following few days revisited winter with a vengeance – the Bell’s Line of Road in the Blue Mountains was closed due to snow falls.
One night things got really interesting.
While we were ‘safely’ tucked away in our little apartment storms raged around us.
Plenty of lightning and heavy rain.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light and a huge bang which seemed to be just outside our front door – but we were unaffected and so remained calm (after a brief moment of mild panic).
What we didn’t realise at the time, but discovered later, was that a tree outside our front door had come down.
Thankfully it fell away from the building and NOT onto any cars or people. So, apart from a cleanup job next morning we came through unscathed.
Not so, a friend across the road – at the same time as our tree came down her place had a power blackout.
One of the things I find fascinating about Sydney is how localised the destruction caused by nature can be when these storms hit.
Years ago, before Danita and I were an item, Sydney was hit by a massive hail storm. At the time I was living in the Eastern Suburbs and Danita was on the North Shore.
There area I was in, suffered a huge amount of damage – roofs destroyed, hardly a single sheet of glass remained intact, cars trashed across whole suburbs.
After it had passed and we started to breathe again I phoned Danita to see how she was. She had no idea anything had happened – it hadn’t even rained for her.
This week saw the same thing, although this time it was the Northern Suburbs’ turn. A friend living nearby called her father (who lives in the East) to check that he was OK and found that he didn’t know what she was talking about.
Sydney’s famous for its ‘Southerly busters’ and rightly so. We’ve just enjoyed another one.
Now it’s back to warm sunny days.
Sancho’s quite a mature dog and one of the signs of aging is that he’s pretty deaf. In his younger (hearing) days he’d bark at storms and the combination of him barking, the noise of the storm and our shouting at him to settle down (on reflection that seems a pretty dumb response) made storms very challenging.
So, we’re grateful for at least one aspect of his aging.