Linda's Walkabout: North Sydney Masters Swim Training Weekend at Mollymook

For the past 13 years the North Sydney Masters have hosted a swim training weekend in Mollymook which is a 4 hour drive along the coast south of Sydney. It's largely a "beach town" with a population of 1,054 who are all largely retired.

I drove down with friends on Friday, Feb. 26 for my first "Mollymook Weekend". We met up with everyone for dinner on Friday at the Mollymook Golf Club. When we arrived, we walked into this huge hall and everyone was seated at small tables and looking our direction - my first thought was "wow, we walked into a senior home right in the middle of their bingo game."

But there were no cards and chips, nor was there the expected Bingo signboard of all the letter/numbers that had been called. Instead there was a large "Wheel of fortune" like spin wheel and a large grocery case of frozen meat. Believe it or not, this was a "meat raffle". For $5 for a strip of tickets, these players had a chance of winning a package of different pieces of meat each valued at about $15. This was an interesting view into life in small town of Australia.

We did two swim practice sessions over the weekend at the swimming pool in Ulladulla. It was great to swim in a pool with non-salt water and an actual lane with a line down the middle and to aid in my flip turns on each wall which is unlike what we have at the North Sydney pool.

After Saturday's session - on our way to the grocery store - we checked out "The Reject Store" which is essentially like our "$1 Store" and has all the overstock items or things that didn't sell in the store. We each purchased a lot of things and so I paid $1 for a shopping cart to carry our "haul" back to the car (you get the $1 back upon its return to the store).

A random tangent here. A few friends have asked "Is it true that toilets in Australia flush counter-clockwise" and the answer is "no, they've got this system that sucks the water directly back into the bowl without circling at all."

So while this answer might disappoint - I have found another interesting phenomenon. Shopping carts that pull sideways. It's the strangest thing but in multiple instances the shopping carts I've used at the grocery stores pull sideways making it very difficult to navigate through a parking lot. I'm not sure why this happens but I will speculate that it has something to do with the pull of gravity "Down Under", check it out yourself in this FlipVideo.