A Week in Lorne

Okay, so it wasn't quite a week, but it felt like it! I went to Lorne for a conference. I wasn't presenting, but Slavica and Stefania were presenting posters. We all rented a house together along with Stefania's parents who took care of Giorgia while we were at the conference. It was a really fun week, but very busy. The conference started at 8:30am and finished at 10:30pm every day, with a 3 hour lunch break where we could relax a little and go swimming. But it still meant that we didn't get much sleep and the 4 days of conference felt like forever.

We did have a lot of fun too, though. One one of the days, I went boogie boarding with Slavica and my supervisor, Lisa. OMG, that was so much fun. I didn't really want to, but when I did, I didn't regret it. I even had an awesome boogie board with a tiger on it. Oh yeah - renegade boogie boarder, that's me!

So here are some of the photos from the time spent at Lorne. There are a few, so I hope I don't bore you too much with them!

This is the house that we stayed in. That driveway was so steep, even though it doesn't really look it. I had to do a reverse hill start everytime I drove and after 2 years of only driving sporadically, I was very impressed with my efforts!

That's the view from the deck/balcony. It was so peaceful out there and we had visitors to the deck too... lorikeets, cockatoos and a variety of other birds. I taught Giorgia to say Cocky. It's amazing how quickly she picks up words at the moment!

Okay, so maybe I went a bit crazy on the bird shots!

Lorne itself is such a pretty town. Rolling hills leading down to a beautiful white sandy beach. There are great views from just about everywhere. Here are some of them.

In that last beach photo, you can see the sea mist, which came and went throughout our time there. Sometimes it was so thick, you couldn't see the hills at all.

We did spend quite a bit of time at the beach. It is really lovely and the water was so refreshing. Quite cold at first, but once you got used to it, it was beautiful!

We spent lots of time hanging out as one big happy family. Of course Giorgia always features heavily in the photos.

Slavica took the following Giorgia pics. I was pulling faces to try and make her smile/giggle, but I didn't have much luck.

Just to prove that we did do some work...

This is Slavica with the conference abstracts and with her poster.

This is Stefania with her poster, with Lisa and explaining her work to Paul from ATA.

And finally, here's George discussing troublesome Caerin with Tara. They're standing in front of Tara's poster.

Overall it was lots of fun, but also really tiring. I forgot to mention the conference social and dancing with my supervisor. Haha! I wouldn't have guessed about that one in advance. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the occasion, but that was lots of fun too.