Deckchair on the ice sir?

Last night and early hours of this morning we had several Frost Quakes. Weirdest things. Sounds like someone trying to break in to the house. Huffle even went downstairs to ch ck if someone WAS breaking in to the house. Small said they went on for about an hour. Huffle explains them by: snow that thaws and seeps into the ground quickly, the rapid freezing in temperatures causes the water to turn to ice. The expansion causes the movement of earth and makes weird creaks and booms!

This morning was -16*. Beautiful sunshine but still mighty cold. Still, we haven't been out properly for ages so we decided to go for a walk late morning but not before Huffle caught up with Grandads trip to Australia on FaceTime.

Huffle made a small picnic for us to take on our walk and we packed the rucksack with nice things and headed off to FrenchmansBay (about 25 mins away). There was no-one there today (until we were almost finished and then people arrived - probably walking off their Sunday Lunch) and we had the beach to ourselves.

The first thing we noticed on the frozen lake was lots of little tents set up ready for ice fishing. Ice Fishing? That's weird! Crazy people who sit in the middle of the ice, make a hole to fish through whilst sitting in a square tent with a heater to keep them warm. A heater on the ice! Absolutely nuts! There was a whole row of them too.

Huffle with his too tight rucksack. Silly faces boys. Chucking rocks

Ice. Shadows. Steaming ice. Shadows. More ice

Wandering along the streets until we came to the boardwalk and beach, the boys chucking rocks and stones on the ice trying to crack it (not where the fishermen were obviously). I dropped my glove taking photos and Small and Huffle lowered Smallest onto the ice (much to my trepidation) and he returned it to me. Mind you the ice was really thick.

There was a mist forming on the horizon where the ice was being heated by the sun. Very freaky looking. Some of the rocks were encased in ice or had an ice hat on them. There were bits of weird shapes of ice close to the water and some of the stones were covered in ice. The sun was lovely and warming but we stil needed hats, gloves, scarves and coats.

Lost glove. More ice. Bench for short legged people. Sunshine.

Ice on beach. Ice on stones. Ice on rocks. Steaming ice. Me. Icicles. Boys chucking stones

We ate our picnic perched on the rocks overlooking the steaming water. Today we took English Chocolate bars with us and we set the marker of the lighthouse before we could eat them, making us walk a bit more along the beach, skimming stones, breaking ice and finding beach glass for my collection.

Ice. Picnics. Tree roots. Icy roots. Silly Huffle on tree roots. Pier thing

Lighthouse. Road to lighthouse. Chocolate stop

Birds. Boys sliding. Ice

There were loads of people out taking photos on the other side of the harbour entrance with huge lenses, we think taking photos of the ducks. Possibly a club as they all seemed to know each other. The boys spent lots of time sliding on the icy puddles on our way back to the car. I watched a man take a chair out on the ice and sit there with his feet up with a beer.

Frozen lake. Ice bathing?

On the way home we stopped for mr piddle pants to wee behind a building in a park and then came home for a warm, a cup of tea and a game of cards and a couple of games of Kingdomino which I seem to keep winning.

We all watched GrandTour with our Huffle-made dinner and then the boys made us a Sundae each with the jelly and angel delight they made yesterday plus a bit of ice cream and broken biscuits. Very nice boys!

This evening Huffle and I started watching Godless (Netflix). Think it's going to be good.

 

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