Sharing some lighthouse love

I'm not sure how often I've shared with you lovely readers how much I like looking at lighthouses, but I think it's been a while since I talked about them in here so I thought it was time to share the love again.

This is Deal Island Lighthouse in Bass Strait, the highest located lighthouse in Australia at 320 metres above sea level. It's not a tall lighthouse though, at only twenty metres tall. It was deactivated in 1992 after lights were installed on nearby North East and South West Islands.

It is my dream to one day tour the whole coast of Australia to see as many lighthouses as I can. I think lack of funds might put an end to my grand plans, but it's nice to think I might see some of them. I've now seen all the lighthouses on the north coast of New South Wales from Fingal Head down to Crowdy Head but one day I would love to do all the southern state ones.

Getting our lighthouse fix

Half the people in our house are sick at the moment. One of the others was sick last week. I'm hoping that breastfeeding might give the baby a less severe bout of whatever bug it is (he's still hanging in there staying well, I think, but he has been a bit whingey in the past day or two). I haven't gotten it yet but  the odds would suggest it's only a matter of time before I get sick too.

So to escape the germs, I took the well child out for some one on one time this afternoon while Dad, the baby, the toddler and the ten year old were sleeping. We went off to the library together to pick up a book that he had waiting for him. Then, because we are the two lighthouse-lovers in our family, we headed down for a visit to one of the local lighthouses. Recently, they've done a bit of restoration work on the foundations of the old lighthouse keeper's cottage so you can now have a look at a floor plan of what it looked like once, and you can see the foundations of each of the rooms. We'd been and seen it once before, but it didn't matter. He was fascinated by it again. It's always amazing to see how little space was required for a large family to live in, compared with the oversized homes of today.

And then we had hot chips from the local takeaway shop when we got back from our walk before returning to the illness fray.

A very pleasant way to spend an afternoon before school goes back tomorrow.

Revisiting old TV shows and sharing the lighthouse love

The kids spent some of this afternoon watching episodes of Round the Twist on DVD. We have made it about halfway through Series 1.

This is a show I remember from my younger days. The first series was made in 1989 so I was too old to be watching it in first year University, but I remember it being on TV, presumably because my younger brothers may have been watching. Apparently a further three series were made over a period of about ten years, with lots of recasting required. And they are based on books written by the prolific Australian author Paul Jennings, which of course we will now be hunting down at the library.

Although they are a bit frightened of ghosts, which have featured quite heavily so far, the boys have been enjoying it. Mostly the ghosts turn out to be friendly, so we no longer have the two of them leaving the room or quivering with fear whenever a ghost turns up in the story.

For me (and Liam, who also likes lighthouses), the coolest thing about this series is that the family live in a lighthouse, the one in the above picture. It's located at Split Point, along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. One day we will drive that road to see all the lighthouses along it. In the meantime we'll just continue watching Round the Twist so we can get our fix.