A day with the beautiful people.

 Today we were going going to the northern beaches but David and Zoe persuaded us that we should go to an iconic site in Sydney, the majestic Bondi Beach. This is a land of beautiful people who live sybaritic lives. The sun was shining and the beach itself was relatively full of young people all practising a form of sun worship. We parked at one end of the beach and paid 4 dollars to park for an hour, which we felt was a little high, but this was an iconic site. We walked along the esplanade feeling a tad on the old side. However, there is nothing quite so odd as watching fifty something g men running up and down the beach trying to maintain their six packs as well as their tan.
The beach itself is everything we were led to believe at school, golden sands, deep blue sea, fit life savers and surfers. The waves were crashing in at one end of the beach and the surfers seemed to be enjoying themselves.
This is in short the Australian dream that we were promised in the days of the ten pounds assisted passage , sand sun, warm seas and beautiful bodies.
After Bondi we made our way to Coogee beach where we had lunch. Another beautiful beach with high cliffs which we walked along after lunch.The town council had very kindly put up white railings along the cliff edge with clear  notices telling people the cliff edges were unstable. This did not deter some Australians from climbing over the ail and sitting right on the edge. Now I am all for taking the odd risk but when we eventually got a sideways look along the cliffs it was very clear that a large part of the cliffs had fallen away fairly recently. This rather persuaded us that the edge was not  safe.
A little further around the cliff we came across a party of youngsters who were jumping fifty feet off the cliff into a pool of water surrounded by rocks. They wer edging this with the casualness of youth, no worries, no concerns and no thought of danger.
After Coogee we drove to Bronte another picturesque beach which shelved a little more steeply.
By this time it was time to head home. Our journey home was not helped by my complete inability to follow the very clear signals that the car's sat nav system was giving us.the situation was not helped whenI decided to argue withe trip's navigator who firmly told me that I was wrong and that I needed to listen to her more carefully.
The mood darkened when having gone through the tunnel and moving onto the Military Road the sat nav decided that we were heading  in  the wrong direction and tried unsuccessfully to get us to turn left into a one way road. This then entered the "turn around when possible" phase , followed by do a "u turn when it is safe to do so" chapter, followed by "turn left and left again " until we had reached the point where we could take no more and turned the thing off. As we had no map this presented us with another problem and it took us a a little while to find our way back to David and Zoe's. it would be fair to say that tempers were a little fraught when we eventually got home.
The evening was very relaxing and for some reason, so far unexplained to me we appeared to get through four bottles of wine.the chapter of the book I read in bed needs to be retread tonight.