sf 2 oz

I waved Sarah off to the airport today and was so sad to see her go!  It was wonderful to have an old college friend here for 10 days. I unfortunately had to work a decent amount of time while she was here, but we still managed to spend quality time together enjoying the sights and the food..our personal favorite. On Friday we headed to the Hunter Valley (my third time!) and had a fabulous day. We were the only ones to sign up for this particular wine tour and our guide, Richard, was quite the self proclaimed wine expert. He made us take copius note and even gave us quizzes..kind of comical. Although, we did learn a lot about how to taste wine! Plus we had a fancy morning tea at Peppers Guest House and lunch at Roberts, which was awesome (though pricey). On Saturday, we did the Bondi to Coogee cliff walk, followed by fish n' chips and ice cream. It was a gorgeous day and it was fun to walk on the new portion of the boardwalk near Waverly cemetary. That night we had some people over to our new place and we put our newfound wine tasting skills to test :) Sunday we headed out to Manly for a BBQ hosted by our friends Monique and Murray. We all stuffed ourselves with lots of red meat, salad and dessert then went for a nice walk to the beach. A perfect Sunday. Oh yes, we also went to see Wicked! I'd been wanting to see it forever and it was a great show. I still have some of the songs from it in my head. I did find it interesting that even though the actors were local everything was done in American accents. Anyway, here's a few pics from our time together.

This morning we awoke to a completely surreal sight. The entire city was enveloped in a huge dust storm that was covering half the state of NSW.  The entire city was transformed into some sort of bizarre martian landscape that is now covered in a fine layer of red dust (along with our bedroom that had an open window).  As of 2pm most of the storm has cleared, but I'm sitting at the airport now facing a 3+ hour delay to SFO as a result.  Here are some pictures I took outside of our apartment around 7am.

We just had a squall roll through around 15 minutes ago which added some excitement to the end of the day.  We haven't seen a good thunderstorm in quite a while as they're pretty rare in San Francisco.  Here's a few pictures I captured out our back window.