Seeing the lights

My newest resolution is to get outdoors more, so I put DD through his paces over the weekend.

Well, to be fair, we put each other through our paces.

The weekend started with dinner at Lovat in Newport. We joined a few of DD’s local gang for steaks and lots of dirty martinis. Well, DD and I stuck to beer and a few glasses of wine, but the rest of the table were requesting rounds of “really wet, really dirty” martinis.

Afterwards, DD and I wondered what really wet, really dirty martinis actually are.

I asked my phone and apparently a wet martini has a higher ratio of vermouth to gin or vodka than a dry martini. A dirty martini includes olive brine. The olive brine is what gives the drink its “dirty” character, as it introduces a salty, savoury flavour. 

Since I’m on the subject of martini trivia, I discovered through my Drinks Digest work that the vodka martini was originally called a Kangaroo Kicker.

According to Punch: “The Kangaroo was likely created in the early 1940s by Oscar Haimo, at the time head bartender at the Pierre in New York City. He called it the “Kangaroo Kicker,” a rumoured tribute to the Australian soldiers fighting alongside the Allies. In Haimo’s 1943 book Cocktail Digest, the Kangaroo Kicker recipe is given as: “2 oz. vodka, 3/4 oz. French vermouth, shaken, served with a twist.”

In anticipation of an impending gin shortage in the US, Haimo was experimenting with vodka cocktails in his bar program, and the Kangaroo Kicker was born.

But the name didn’t hang around long and it quickly became a bog standard vodka martini … until recently, when bartenders from New York to Tennessee started adding Kangaroos to their cocktail menus.

Anyways that’s a long story about a drink DD and I don’t really like. I know martinis are super trendy, but they just taste like metho in a fancy glass to me, unless they’re really, really dirty, then they taste like metho mixed with olive brine in a fancy glass, which is vaguely palatable.

On Saturday, as I was sipping a chicken pho at our local Vietnamese joint, DD suggested we catch a ferry to Patonga for fun.

We drove to the Palm Beach ferry wharf, snagged a miracle spot in the carpark and headed across to Patonga on the most glorious afternoon.

The next ferry back to Palm Beach was scheduled for an hour’s time, so we went for a beach walk … sort of together …

Then we slammed a cider at The Boathouse at Patonga as we watched the ferry slid back to the wharf.

It was such a wonderful interlude. Patonga is dead set divine, so zen and picturesque.

On Sunday night it was my turn to choose the entertainment and I wanted to see a few Vivid Sydney highlights before burying myself in the business end of the festival.

I was particularly keen to see this light installation, so we hiked up the hill in Barangaroo, joined the queue and got my desired happy snaps …

Then we pootled around to a few other pretty spots, including the lovely Bloom in the Argyle Cut tunnel, which has transformed into a dreamscape featuring birds and bioluminescent plants from around the world.

We stopped at Squire’s Landing and sipped a glass of wine with a fantastic view of the Sydney Opera House as it showed off its gorgeous colours.

And I took DD to see Romance Was Born’s crochet and iced Volvo filled Customs House installation, which is one of my favourite building projections.

We wandered back to The Rocks and took a few snaps of Sydney Harbour Tall Ships’ The Southern Swan as she headed out on an evening cruise, while a band of colourful Hare Krishnas danced past …

We crammed a lot into two hours and that was enough for my dodgy hip.

I can’t sign off without saying how my heart goes out to the many people doing it tough due to terrible flooding throughout NSW.

I hope your weekend was a safe, happy one.

Song of the day: Fall Out Boy “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)”