Around Cronulla

I've mentioned before how big the waves are, and a couple of you mentioned you'd like to see them.  So, we finally got some pictures taken in the last couple of days.  Keep in mind that all of these are taken at low tide.
First, here's the sandy part where you could actually walk down to the surf.  Even there, there's a bit of a drop off, and I wasn't willing to go down any further.

To give you some scale, here's a guy surfing, and some middle schoolers using boogie boards in the "smaller" waves.  

The waves come up so high, there's a wall running along the beach so the waves don't get people walking along.  Even so, at high tide, you can't walk buy the wall, because the waves crash over it.  Here's Daniel sitting on the wall I'm talking about.

You can see a lower wall below the swiss cheese like wall with holes.  Here's a couple of pictures of the waves hitting the lower wall and splashing at least 10 feet into the air.  At high tide the waves do that all the way up to where Daniel is sitting.

Pictures don't do it justice, but hopefully that helps.  This beach is about 2 blocks from us.  We walk along it at least once a day.  Daniel likes to come out at night, too, to look at the stars.  We can't identify any of the southern hemisphere stars yet.  

Here's a picture of the mall at Cronulla.  There's a few other large busy streets, but this one has the most shops and goes on for while.  At the far end is where we catch the train to Sydney.  All those tents belong to restaurants so people can still eat outside even though it's a bit colder.  

They put all kind of things together here that wouldn't normally be next to each other at home.  For example, in one building in town it houses a couple random retail shops, a bakery, a movie theater, a grocery store, the public library, and their welfare office.  The mall at Miranda where the Aldi is has four stories of normal mall type shops and restaurants as well as pharmacies, a Target, a Walmart (called The Big W here), Aldi and 4 other grocery stores, a fish market, several butchers and bakeries, a Bed Bath and Beyond store, Krispy Kreme, two food courts, and Dollar like stores.  And I've only managed to cover 2 of the four floors in the two times I've been there.  

The last two days we have just hung around Cronulla and Miranda (3km away).  Tomorrow we are going to drive out to the Blue Mountains (sort of like Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains).  We're spending the night and then seeing Jenolan Caves the next day and heading back.  On Saturday we're heading back into Sydney to do another walking tour and for me to see all the neat shopping areas.  I think Daniel's going to walk across the Harbor Bridge while I do that.  It's a thing, not just him being dramatic about walking off a bridge instead of shopping.  Sunday we'll see the Botanic Gardens and go to the Ballet competition at the Opera House.