Drive to Bondi and other Sydney beaches and dinner at Italian restaurant.

Travel is good for the soul but it can be hard on the elderly body. Our hosts leave for a variety of appointments and we spend the morning and early afternoon doing laundry and administrative chores. Basically giving ourselves a rest and a moment of reflection.

Gay returns but her husband is delayed in a doctor’s office, so, toward late afternoon, Gay drives us to Double Bay, where Cynthia has identified a shop that sells acrylic platters she can’t live without (we get two), past Point Piper (where David installed A/C in Tom and Nicole’s house back in the day), Rose Bay, and Watson’s Bay where we amble around a lookout over cliffs named “The Gap.” The walk along the top of the tall cliffs is now fenced and several cameras have been installed in efforts to reduce the number of suicides that regularly occur. An octogenarian who lived just below the Gap used to watch for potential suicides and would talk with people he thought had “the look,” but he is gone now. The anchor of the Dunbar, which wrecked 500 yards offshore during a heavy northeast gale on August 20, 1857, was recovered 50 years later and is attached to the cliff face. One survivor of 122 souls.

We watch the surfers and swimmers and young Adoni and bikini-clad girls stroll along Bondi Beach and Tamarama Beach and Bronte Beach and Coogee Beach and return home to get gussied up for going to Grappa, an Italian restaurant that is chock full of central-casting godfathers (tables of 20 people, all the men at one end, all the women at the other. Big bellies).

The restaurant serves four kinds of Negronis and David Grant chooses one that is delivered by a comely waitress on a tray under a large bell jar in which wood smoke swirls. As several tables look on, she removes the jar and smoke billows into the atmosphere. A Smokey Negroni and a very good meal with a Greywacke Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc (2016) and a Dezzani Barolo San Carlo (2011, three years in barrique… wowzer! Rating: 4.7)

We take trains home and crash.

Another beach day in Oz.