Going for gold

My weekend was filled with celebrations for DD’s significant birthday.

I won’t say which significant birthday it was, other than to note he is now eligible for a senior’s card. I may have mentioned this to him frequently to stir him up. Although he got very excited when he heard there was something called a Gold Senior’s Card as he thought that sounded really fancy.

The gold senior/pensioner Opal card gives holders unlimited travel for no more than $2.50 a day, when using public transport services across the Opal network.

As he spends a lot of time on the yellow B1 bus into the city these days, heading to booze functions with me, this sounded awesome, but we’re not sure he qualifies yet. Damn!

I headed up to DD’s place on Thursday night so I could be there when he woke up on his birthday on the Friday. The youngest dropped me off because she has severe withdrawal symptoms when she is separated from my car for more than a few hours at a time.

The dogs and I wandered down to the coffee shop to get DD a birthday brew the next morning, but his birthday was sadly filled with back-to-back meetings from 7am until 3pm.

At 5pm we headed to Bert’s at The Newport for pre-dinner drinks.

It was our first time at Bert’s and we fell in love with the place. According to the website, it is a bar and brasserie reminiscent of the grand hotel dining rooms of the 1930s, with the relaxed air of Sydney’s northern beaches.

Bert’s has an aperitivo hour from 5pm that includes $14 cocktails. Woo hoo! We also knew the girlfriend of one of the bartenders so he took very good care of us.

Cheers to that!

We ate a few too many snacks with our cocktails so we weren’t super hungry when we got to dinner at Lovat, but we hooked into a couple of steaks anyway.

The next morning DD headed off for a birthday workout with The Warrior and I pootled up to Avalon headland for coffee and a sunrise. It was very cloudy, so it the best sunrise of all time, but it was still lovely.

I also got very excited when I saw a pod of about 40 dolphins gently swimming past. About 15 minutes later they made their way back down the coast. It seemed slightly odd dolphin behaviour but was in awe of the beautiful spectacle … until I noticed one of the dolphins was red and realised the wonder of nature that I’d been marveling at was actually a group of kayakers.

Time to go to Specsavers …

We had lunch with DD’s sister and partner and his mum on Saturday at a place called Kipling’s Garage in Turramurra.

We ordered two serves of the limoncello cheesecake with lots of spoons for dessert. Yum!

A couple of friends came over on Saturday night and DD picked up pizza for dinner while accidentally wearing a birthday gift badge that said something like “Getting sexier every year” … and while deliberately wearing Crocs and socks.

He only realised the badge bit afterwards and said that probably explained why the guy behind the counter gave him a very strange look.

The youngest came and picked me up around lunchtime on Sunday and I reluctantly returned to the real world.

Speaking of the unreal world … the official pics came back from the whisky event I took DD to last week and there was one of me with my drinks writer mates …