1. Shoal Bay

Dolphin Capital of Australia

We used our favorite strategy for starting a vacation by getting a few easy hours out of town on the first night. We stopped briefly at Tri Nature's offices in Newcastle, then continued on to Shoal Bay Holiday Park.

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Shoal Bay is just about 3 hours North of Sydney or 1 hour north of Newcastle.

This was our first time using the cabins at the Australian holiday parks. We were pleasantly surprised at how spacious and clean the cabins were for the bargain price of about A$45/night. Located in a park setting, the grounds were far superior to similar priced motels.

Shoal Bay call themselves the Australian dolphin watching capital with numerous pods that call the bay home. There are a number of boat tour companies that provides bay tours.

The lack of photos for this first Leg of the trip was due to the fact that we only had 1 set of standard alkaline batteries which ran out of power too quickly when we used the real-time LCD display on the back of the camera. We eventually found a most remarkable rechargeable alkaline battery system - Grandcell - which we used for the entire trip recharging daily. The 3 Flash RAM chips were downloaded to a Toshiba laptop daily.

Sydney - Manly

I just want to backtrack a bit to Manly where we said good-bye to my work mates at FPS Pty Ltd. We had a very nice sending off BBQ and the group gave us a very nice Kodak DC215 digital camera which we used to take photos on the rest of the trip.

To my friends at FPS - thank you for the most exhilarating and educational few years of my life. It is rare that a team of this professionalism and expertise can be assembled anywhere.

Automating Business
Andrew Cheeseman	Careen Cheeseman
Ben Gundry	Jana
Justine Walsh	John Twomey
Kate Ng	Wai Ip Chan
Dominic Ward
Not pictured: Robert Jadrejevic and Wenjia Cheng. Also remembered: Julie Spencer and Rosemary M. and Neil Stewart.

Gilbert's at the Manly Parkroyal Hotel

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