Batemans Bay ETL Weekend

This past weekend was the Exchange Teachers' League weekend in Batemans Bay - nice not to have to travel away for one of these weekends! A lot of the teachers came from all over New South Wales: Sydney, Newcastle and further north, Merimbula, Cootamundra, and Canberra (in ACT, I know!) There were also some former Australian exchangees and a couple of next year's exchanges, so it was a full and varied weekend.

http://www.southcoast.com.au/batemansbay/
The highlight was on Saturday: a boat trip up the Clyde River to Nelligan and back, a 3-hour tour, and the weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed, if not for the courage of the fearless crew the Merinda would be lost... All kidding aside, we had a great day. It was cloudy, but we all had a good time and got back safely. We got to go under the opening bridge in town twice (the one I got stuck at twice today, once in the morning and once in the afternoon - the only times the bridge opens!) There's not much to see in Nelligan anymore, just a cafe and small general store, plus some historic buildings. It used to be the main port on this part of the coast, but the entrance to the Clyde River was a bit hard to locate for the ships, so they started building out at the coast and Batemans Bay was born.














We all had wood-fired pizza at the organizers' house on the Saturday night, I think someone said that Warren cooked 76 pizza! I didn't bother to make my own, as everyone else was doing, because as I just stood on the large deck they have, people would walk by with their freshly cooked pizzas and offer me a slice; I tried many delicious varieties of pizza this way. Wood fired pizza is really popular down here, many of our friends have pizza ovens in the back yards, and there is an awesome pizzaria in town called Heat that serves great pizza. We'd like to try all their flavours, and we're about 1/3 there but rapidly running out of time this year.

Sunday, we had some friends over for coffee and then we all went up to Pebbly Beach for a final barbeque. The weather had been cloudy most of the weekend, but cleared up beautifully on Sunday afternoon. The children went for a swim; I wasn't prepared - no towels or even swimsuits - they just swam in their clothes but didn't mind a bit. We weren't far from home, though.

It was sad saying goodbye at the end of this weekend, because we realized that we may never see any of these people again, with only 8 weeks to go, but we will keep in touch with some, and even get the chance to visit a few.