Back From Holidays: Part One

Last night we touched down in Hong Kong bring­ing to an end a very relax­ing, if emo­tional, hol­i­day down under. We spent hardly any time in Sydney itself, opting instead for a stay at Pearl Beach, on the NSW Cent­ral Coast. It’s the area where L spent her sum­mers as a child. This was our fourth hol­i­day there since C was born.

Since the three of us have amassed a wealth of fre­quent flyer points, we opted to buy Eco­nomy fares with Qantas and chance our arm at upgrades to Busi­ness Class. That proved to be a folly. Des­pite fol­low­ing the pro­ced­ure, the upgrades did not come through and we were stuck with a his­tory lesson in what eco­nomy long-haul travel was like. Rock-hard seats, no per­sonal enter­tain­ment, lousy sound for the almost un-watchable movies and Qantas’ renowned ser­vice with a snarl. I’ve flown long-haul with all three classes on Qantas and never, ever, enjoyed the ser­vice. The words, “never again,” were muttered by all of us sev­eral times on the return flight.

The beach itself was everything we had hoped for, with the weather stay­ing warm and pleas­ant for most of our time there. Pearl Beach is a small town, with a lim­ited number of houses due to its topo­logy and smal­ler crowds since the beach is is neither patrolled, nor offers much surf. This makes it a peace­ful, family-centric place, with little to dis­tract you from a routine of eating, walk­ing, swim­ming and just simply relax­ing. There’s one con­veni­ence store, one café and one real estate agent from which you can pick up the keys for your hol­i­day rental.

As with past trips, we made an order with Simon John­son (pur­veyor of fine foods) to cover most of our gast­ro­nomic needs and sup­ple­men­ted that with trips to the excel­lent Fish and Chip store in Patonga, a small fish­ing and camp­ing town just down the road from “Pearly.”

to be continued…