1/17/04 8:00PM EST – I knew we would get to see snow before we left the United States.  We had been wishing for it all week.  Those glittery flakes were the perfect ending to our last night at home feast.  The feast was a success from the very beginning.  Phase one of our meal was 3.14 pounds of snow crab legs sold to me by a Korean missionary of the Christian church after she made me say “amen” a total of 5 times (Tracy says possibly more.)  The claws were pre-cracked (thank god) and the whole deal was smothered with old bay seasoning that sent me to the kitchen sink to wash up more than once.  Phase two was an old time favorite at the Rose residence: Macaroni and fish sticks dipped in mayonnaise.  As is the usual tradition, tartar sauce was provided but used by no one.  We washed the whole shebang down with a nice bottle of chilled sparkling wine.

1/18/04 5:15AM EST – Tracy and I have both elected to carry three bags each.  An internal frame backpack, a suitcase on wheels, and a small carry-on bag filled with valuables and items for use on the plane.  We both have laptops, which I consider to be part of the carry-on bag.  The weights of my three bags were 25lbs, 33lbs, and 19lbs respectively for a total of 77 lbs.  The weights of Tracy’s three bags were 25lbs, 27lbs, and 23lbs respectively for a total of 75 lbs.  Together we are carrying a combined total of 152lbs of gear!

1/18/04 10:40AM EST – Ahhhh!  Gotta love waking up a 3:30AM!  That’ll put some hair on your chest.  Or at least make you fall asleep in the shower.  We’re about 4 hours into a 32hour journey right now and I think I’m feeling awake for the first time today.  Our plane had ice on the wings, so we were delayed on take off.  We were re-routed to a deicing area where they sprayed a funky smelling viscous green liquid all over our plane.  I think I finally understand what it feels like to be on family double dare (Tracy says she didn’t smell anything, but she was asleep, so who knows what she means by that).  Not that I was sweating the Atlanta connection, but if we had missed our flight across the pacific, we lose our non-refundable 1200USD each, so the thought crossed my mind.  The flight attendant on the first leg of our journey was definitely gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and I swear I heard him giggle after he mentioned that the safety belt had to be worn “tight and low across the hips.”  I suppose we’re enjoying feast part two right now which is composed of pistachios and my new favorite food: BISCOFF!!!  I wonder how much longer I can hold on before I have to go to the bathroom. 

1/18/04 10:50AM EST– Tommy lasted about .2 seconds after he wrote that before he got up to go to the bathroom.  We were sitting next to this guy for a while that was a pilot and a construction consultant, but really I think he is in the mob.  But he didn’t last too long and moved somewhere far away from the likes of us.

(In Australia, they don’t call it a VISA.  They call it a “why do you keep showing me your passport?”)

1/21/04 5:00 AM (Australian time) – So we get off the plane in Sydney right, and realize that we have absolutely nowhere to be for like a month.  It’s quite an interesting feeling.  We booked a hostel from a very helpful little station in the airport, and arranged for a shuttle to come and pick us up.  Literally 18.4 seconds after Tommy hung up the phone with the hostel, a little Australian leprechaun appeared behind us and said, “Tom? Tom? Time to go!”  And he would motion for us to follow and then scurry away so we couldn’t keep up.  And then he’d disappear, only to return a few seconds later to say, “Wait here, we have to pick up a couple more people,” and then he’d run away again.  He had left us with two “kiwis” (New Zealanders), who foolishly thought that we were the “couple more people” he had scurried away from them for.  Finally he reappeared, and we followed him to a van and he shuttled us away to our hostel.  The first thing we noticed was the beautiful blue sky and the gorgeous weather.  We were dropped off at our hostel, Glebe Village Backpackers, in the suburb of Sydney called Glebe, which seems to be the student and hippie section if you ask me.  But the place was very accommodating and we shared a room with a Brit and two other guys that I don’t know where they’re from because I still can’t tell the difference between a British and an Australian accent.  Strangely enough, the guy who checked us in was named Edward Rose and was the most flamboyant person I’ve ever seen in my life.  That makes the first two Australians we met a leprechaun and someone with the same name as Tommy (minus the Tommy part).  We changed clothes and washed up a bit, and then decided to go for a walk, no destination in mind.  So we walked the streets of Sydney, talking about the way they drive on the left and stopping every so often to get a drink or some fish and chips.  We ended up at Victoria Park, a splendid little park with a lake and a pool and lots of people just hanging out.  To me, people just hang out here.  When you go downtown in DC on a weekday, you see basically two kinds of people: people in business attire that know exactly where they are going, and tourists.  In Sydney however, there seems to just be a whole bunch of people that just hang out.  The pace seems very laid back.  So this park was just like a park in the United States, except for the birds.  The first weird bird we saw had a super long beak; he was like the Pinocchio of birds.  And then, we were watching the ducks in the pond and all of a sudden this Godzilla duck came out that was like 4 times normal size.  It was crazy.  I don’t know what they put in the water here, but Tommy keeps rubbing it on his penis referring incessantly to the Godzilla duck.  We walked around the park for a bit and ended up on the backside at the University of Sydney.  We didn’t explore too much, but it seemed like a typical university.  The library seemed small to me, but the school was attractive and I could see myself getting comfortable there.  Now, at this point it was about 5pm Sydney time, and we were totally exhausted from our 40 hour traveling escapades.  So we walked back to the hostel and decided to go in and take a “little nap.”  So, we both crashed on the bed and didn’t wake up until now, at 5am the next morning.  So much for a short nap.  Tommy is a little disappointed I think, because there was supposed to be a ping pong tournament last night at our hostel that he wanted to enter.

1/22/04 Midday - So much for the ridiculous idea of beating jetlag.  If I didn’t consider this to be the opportunity of a lifetime, I would probably be sleeping away the first couple of days here.  I tell you it’s a good thing trouble keeps looking for me, because I sure as heck am too tired to go looking for her.  So when I woke up yesterday morning at 5AM before the sun was even up I had to go in search of book illumination outside my room to keep from disturbing the brits. (God damned brits! How did they find me here?!)  I stumbled down the stairs at an hour that I fear my parents would finally consider to be reasonable looking for light when I spotted some coming from under the doorway that I remembered from yesterday leading into the common space with the couches and the computers.  I didn’t have to turn the knob because when I reached for it, I nudged the door and it swung open.  The room beckoned to me with a soft repetitive beeping sound.  As I entered the room, my mind couldn’t help but drift back to my homeland where that very same noise would have indicated that an intruder had been detected and that a deafening alarm would soon follow.  I’m not sure, but I think it was somewhere in my nostalgic trance that I realized, with a moment of panic, that Australian alarm systems work exactly as American ones do.

I was sitting outside on a bench across the street from our hostel when I finished calculating that I had been in Australia about 18 total hours before I caused the police to be summoned.  Ha ha, their police cars look funny.  Let’s never speak of this moment again.

$27 dollars / night might seem a bit steep before you factor in all the money you saved on that free breakfast.  The only problem, is that you have to factor it out again while sitting at a third party café wondering why they consider black-as-death-vegemite smeared on toast to be breakfast.  I was never really that good at factoring anyway, so I was lucky to have procrastinated on the first calculation rendering the reverse calculation obsolete.

            When we got on the bus to go to Miller’s point, we figured we would simply get out at the end of the line with everyone else.  Funny, how you make these plans with out considering that the bus might travel in loop.  So we got out, and walked for a bit before stumbling on a scenic walkway which took us all along the harbor, to exactly all the places we wanted to go in a couple miles or less.  (I mean, a crap load of kilometers or less.)  This seriously could not have worked out more perfectly.  All the planning in the world could not have produced a situation this perfect.

            Climbing the stairs of the south-eastern pylon, we paused to take some nice shots of the Sydney opera house, and ask a bystander with binoculars what all the lunatics were doing up on the bridge’s suspension network.  Doing “the bridge climb” he said.  For only $170, it seems that you can do what thousands of locals and tourists do every year to get the best view of the harbor: That is, you can tether yourself to one the cables on the bridge and climb over the freakin’ thing inch by inch.

            So we continued the Cahill walk, which eventually led us to the ostensible Sydney opera house. At closer inspection, it seems that the entire Sydney opera house is covered with a simple pattern of white and off-white bathroom tiles.  No joke, they’re exactly like the ones in my bathroom at home.  Think what you will, but the things do the trick.  The Opera house looks amazing.

            There are tons of little food joints surrounding the harbor, and we spent about an hour in one called the Portobello where we talked about how ridiculous it would be do order all of your drinks with no ice like the travel guides say you should.

            Okay Tracy is taking over because Tommy is tired of writing.  We walked around the harbor a bit more, stopped by the Museum of Contemporary Art to see an unimpressive exhibit by Tracy Moffatt, and then we took a water taxi down to Darling Harbour.  The taxi ride was well worth the $10 we each paid, as we saw an amazing view of Sydney and had some wind blowing to cool us off.  Our taxi driver informed us that the “Bridge Climb” Tommy talked about earlier drew in over $50 million each year. Crazy, huh?

            Darling Harbour was just as stunning as Sydney Harbour, and we spent a few hours walking through the Sydney Aquarium.  There are three words I can think of to describe the aquarium: Nemo, Nemo, Nemo.  They were obsessed with Finding Nemo.  They had little pictures of the characters everywhere and tanks devoted to the movie.  The place was great though.  We saw a platypus and penguins and lots and lots of clownfish and we saw really big sharks and it was great.  While we were in there, it started to thunder outside (luckily I brought my umbrella!) and we made our way to the mall to check out a true Australian mall.  We didn’t stay long and got some Vietnamese food (mmm..honey chicken) and then hopped on a bus back to our accommodation.  We changed clothes and then headed back downtown to the opera house.

            We were lucky enough to get the last two tickets to “The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)” at the playhouse in the Sydney Opera House.  We sat on the side of the front row and the play was fantastically hilarious.  The play consisted of three male actors performing at least part of every play that Shakespeare ever wrote.  There was lots of interaction with the audience and it wasn’t long before they picked on Tommy.  And when they discovered he was American, it opened up a whole new window of opportunity to make jokes.  First they asked if I was his girlfriend and how long we had been together, and when we told them they backed down a little because it was the longest relationship they’d seen from couples in those two seats in the six weeks the show had been going on.  Go us!  Then, they made fun of his hat and asked if he was afraid the ceiling would open up and his scalp would get burned.  Then, they did an impression for us of a squirrel in the back of a pickup truck who was throwing up from eating too much pizza.  Hilarious.  After the show we took a cab back to the hostel and collapsed in bed so we could get up early to catch a train.

(Speaking of which, why didn’t we put more contact cement on my tattered shoes when we were gluing the suede on Tracy’s?  Just one more missed opportunity to throw on the heap I guess.)

(Keep track of your change here, or you could soon find yourself with a drooping beltline, and $8.50 in heavy metal baggage.)

1/29/04 8:00AM – We’ve spent a total of seven nights in Lismore, NSW and it’s been a really good experience.  We stayed above a pub called the Metropole Hotel.  The accommodation was amazing and we had a huge air-conditioned room with a double and a twin bed.  There was some confusion when we checked-in and we ended up with the best room for the cheapest room’s price.  Pretty sweet deal.  The pub downstairs is also great, with really helpful bartenders and live music.  When we checked in it was “naked waitress night” or something like that and Tommy literally ran into a girl without her shirt on two steps in the door.  Then last night some guy had won some money gambling and bought us free beers and bought the whole bar free pizza.  No one could figure out at first why the pizza place delivered 6 pizzas and just left them on the bar, but I was thrilled to find out that they were intended for us.

            Lismore is a country town with a population of about 47,000.  It’s home to a university and turned out to be fairly large, but still not a city.  We attended swing dance camp for four days at the city hall, which was pretty fun.  The instructors were mostly American and the people in the camp were all Australian so it was a really good opportunity to meet the locals.  Tommy even met a girl from Melbourne who volunteered a place to stay for us when we make it down there.  We took workshops all day and then went to a dance at night.  Tommy competed in the jack and jill dance competition and did really well and made it to the finals and everything.  I think we were still kind of adjusting to the jet lag so by the time the dances started I was pretty wiped out. 

            We took a really nice train ride from Sydney up here and we got to see a lot of Australian scenery.  The country right now is very green, and reminded me a lot of West Virginia.  Small mountains line the coast of Eastern Australia and the train went right through a valley with these mountains on either side.  It was very picturesque.  And I swear I saw three kangaroos right before we got to Lismore, but when I tried to point them out to Tommy we went in a tunnel and they were pretty far off.  We have a bet that whoever sees the first kangaroo in the wild gets the window seat of the plane ride back home.

1/30/04 9:40AM – Last night we arrived in Byron Bay, a coastal town in northern New South Wales.  It seems very touristy and just like any typical beach town.  There are lots of kids and lots of shops, but the beach is absolutely gorgeous.  The sand is soft and the water is a beautiful green.  We arrived in late afternoon yesterday and stopped by the lighthouse on our way in.  The whole scenery was pretty amazing.  The cliffs up by the lighthouse were pretty steep, and eroding an incredible amount, but we made our way down to the beach and Tommy quickly went straight for the water even though he was wearing long pants.  We took some really nice pictures, and we stood on the easternmost point of mainland Australia.  We also saw some dolphins, and supposedly there was a shark there too, but I didn’t see any sharks.  But some local guy near us was like, “Oh yeah, can’t you see its shadow? It’s right there.”  It was lightly raining while we were walking around but it was still hot and the rain was almost a welcome surprise.  We also saw a cool rock formation called Julian Rocks, which is rumored to have someone living in it.  Speaking of rocks, there were all these crazy swimmers out by the rocks just paddling away.  I thought they were lost or in trouble or something, but really they were just going for a nice leisurely swim.  And there was one guy that was not only near rocks, but decided to go through this tiny little canal between rocks with whipping currents and stuff.

            For the next few nights we’re staying in a hostel called, “Backpackers Inn on the Beach,” and it seems really nice except for the lack of air-conditioning.  We’re sharing a room with a girl from Sweden (Daniela), a girl from Hong Kong (Jackie), and a guy from Scotland.  The hostel has direct beach access, a pool, and lots of activities going on.

            The big news of yesterday, however, was the purchase of Jo the Jalopy.  We came away from Lismore with a 1987 Hyundai Excel.  It’s a cute red hatchback, but it is quite old, and we’re still adjusting to driving on the left side of the road.  It’s registered through September, which includes insurance for personal injury but not for damage to the cars we might destroy by driving on the wrong side of the road.  We’re looking into how much that will cost, but the company we talked to only makes year-long contracts.  The best part about the car is that it says, “Bugger!” on the back window, which is an Australian saying for “What a Shame!” or “Too Bad.” Or “Dammit.”

            Today I think we’re just going to be beach bums and we’re about to go out to breakfast with our roommates.  Signing out…

1/31/04 1:16PM – Today is absolutely perfect beach day.  It’s quite hot outside and very sunny with big puffy white clouds.  Tommy is currently taking an introductory surfing class and I spent the last few hours sitting on the beach watching him.  But, the sun finally got a little too hot for me so I retired back to our room.  I’m sure he’ll have more to say about surfing, but it looked like he was doing a pretty good job of it.

            Yesterday we had breakfast at this really great Turkish curry joint.  Tommy ordered the most amazing pancakes with bananas on them, and I ordered eggs, toast, sausage and bacon.  Tommy so graciously let me switch food with him because I wanted his pancakes so bad after I saw them.  Our roommate, Daniela, ordered fresh squeezed apple juice and boy was it fresh squeezed.  It was bright green and tasted just like an apple.  I thought it was good but a little strong, Tommy loved it, and Daniela didn’t like it too much. 

            After breakfast, we spent some time down at the beach.  I think the sand is softer here than in New Jersey, and the water is pretty warm and very transparent.  There was lots and lots of seaweed in it this morning though.  After the beach, we came back and showered and then just walked around the town going in shops, buying ice cream and playing digeridoos.   Tommy bought some fisherman’s pants that I stole and wore today because they are so comfortable and light and flowy.   We ate lunch/dinner yesterday at a little café with chicken wontons and chicken curry, which was really good.  It rained again yesterday afternoon, which seems to be commonplace in Byron Bay, so we stayed in this one shop for a while.  Okay this is probably getting pretty boring.

01/02/2004 7:51PM – So I’ve officially switched over to the Aussie dating system which switches the numbers for the day and the month.  So this journal entry, occurs February 1st, and not January 2^nd, in case you were wondering.  I’ve gotten a bit behind on my journal entries and Tracy has picked up most of the slack, but there are some things that still need mentioning.

            Surfing rocks!  It’s everything that I imagined it to be.  Surprisingly, although it probably shouldn’t have been, surfing reminds me a great deal of boogie boarding.  The key difference is that it’s tons more satisfying to stand up on the board after catching the wave.  Interestingly, I feel as though I’ve grown somehow.  It’s almost as though boogie boarding is like crawling, and surfing is like standing up on two feet.  Now I feel like I’m doing something and can go somewhere.  I am free.  I can’t run quite yet, but I’m walking at least, even if I do fall over from time to time.

            The surfing instructor’s name was Russell, and he was quite good at making fun of international people.  He’s a great guy (very funny).  While in class, I asked a question about something he hadn’t covered yet and he chided me about my question being “preemptive” like the American “preemptive” strike on Iraq.  In the surfing stance we learned, the front foot goes on the board at a 45 degree angle, but “since there were no Germans present,” he said that it would be okay if we placed the foot anywhere between 41 and 53 degrees, and that it would still work.

            About half way through the class, this huge swarm of (note, we just passed 8 kangaroos in a pack on the side of the road) green seaweed stuff invaded our surfing area.  It was pretty annoying at first, but since there were no jellyfish in the water I was fine with it in the long run.  The green stuff felt just like mushy cereal in milk, and Russell told us a story like jack and the bean stalk where jack the surfer falls in the giant’s cereal bowl of corn flakes, and every time the giant pushes the spoon in the water, there are a bunch of waves in the milk.  It was a good story, but I couldn’t get past how jack got up the bean stalk carrying a surfboard at the same time.  The story was totally unbelievable.

            So we kept on surfing for about three hours, and now I’m totally hooked.  I don’t know what I’m going to do when I come back to the United States.

            Last night, there was a barbeque at the hostel we were staying at with tons of food, all you can drink ‘till it’s gone wine, and live entertainment.  The entertainer was from Oberlin and studied at “the Con”, in case Leah is reading.   He was wearing an Oberlin shirt, and his eyes lit up when I mentioned the con.  He gave me one of those looks that are so fun to get that say, “How the heck did you know that?!”  He let people play his guitar and sing, which was cool. 

We had made a bunch of friends at this point, and we were all sitting around talking when I asked if anyone wanted to play Farkel.  (Farkel is this game you play by rolling 6 dice to accumulate points.  First to 10,000 wins.)  Tracy and I were explaining the rules, and people kept asking to join in.  By the time we got started playing, there were too many people to fit on the top of a piece of paper to keep score.  We made it work and started playing.  Shortly into the game we realized that Daniela already knew how to play.  (She calls the game 10,000 instead of farkel for obvious reasons.)  She said that it was really big back where she was from and that they were all get together and play sometimes when they were bored.  So it turned out that Farkel became this weird international connection.  We almost had more countries playing, than we did dice in the game (there are 6 dice in the game).  I ended up winning the game by a narrow margin to continue my undefeated streak.  The next day, Tracy came back, in the last turn of the game to beat me by scoring 4400 in a single turn! (An average scoring turn is about 500 points.)

While we were eating, we met a Swiss gentleman who was quite opinionated and not afraid to share.  He kept trash talking everyone including us, not realizing that we were becoming more and more shocked at what he was saying.  He was one of those guys who considered everyone who wasn’t like himself to be wrong.

02/02/2004

We got up yesterday in Byron Bay and immediately proceeded directly (by accident) to the Byron Bay market, which only occurs on the day we were there.  It reminded me of the HFStival, only with out the HFS.  I guess it was just tival.  We almost bought a plant, but decided we would be bad parents when we realized we were looking for a plant who’s natural climate was the hot, dry, back seat of a 1987 Hyundai Excel.  There aren’t really plants designed to grow in that climate.  At least not ones you can buy at the Byron Bay tival.

I did get swindled though by the Jacob’s Ladder guy.  There was the weird ladder, and you got 50 bucks if you could climb up to the top of it.  I say swindled because I paid my money and didn’t win the prize, but I was doing alright, and I’ll bet I could have gotten the hang of the device before paying out more than 50 dollars in playing fees.  Unfortunately, the schedule and my burning skin would not allow me to play more than one round.  I was forced to move on.  Perhaps we’ll meet again some day Jacob’s Ladder.

Off we went to Port Macquarie.  It was an interesting trip to say the least.  Our car overheated every 22 seconds.  Now, not only did we have to stop at every McDonalds to eat and go to the bathroom, but we also had to stop to get fresh water to douse the car with.  So basically we would get in the car and drive until it started making this weird hissing noise, which I think meant that the car was tired and wanted a break.  I would have wanted a break too, so I didn’t hold it against him.  The upshot of the whole deal was that we got to take breaks from driving as well as the car, which allowed us to feed our now rapidly growing Farkel addiction.

While Tracy was down at a picnic table taking a hit, I unscrewed the radiator cap to discover the radiator was bone dry!  The damned thing coughed up brown liquid on to me.  I must have poured a whole litre and a half into it before it stopped gargling.  This is definitely something we’ll have to get checked out.

Surprisingly, we made it to our destination just fine.  Fine like a blown head gasket!  (Note: our head gasket is not blown).  (Also note:  certain individuals would like it mentioned that there was a farkel ass kicking perpetrated by Tracy on this particular date.  She rolled an odd confounding 4500 pts on a single roll.)

03/02/2004

On the way in to Port Macquarie, we passed a Hyundai dealership that would later inform us that we needed $900 dollars worth of repairs to the car before it would work properly.  Oddly, this was precisely the figure that would cause the final car expenditure to exactly equal the $2000AUD that we thought it would be worth.  Funny how things like that work out.  It actually didn’t end up being quite $900, but I’ll reserve my final figure for the entry at the end of the trip when we will hopefully be selling the car.  We checked around at other car repair places to get estimates, but they all totally dropped the ball.  It seemed we would have to choose between possibly overpaying for the repairs and waiting extra days to get them done by someone who could possibly do a sub par job.  We decided that the safety and the time were just too important to us and told the dealership to do the work.  At this point, something amazing happened.  It turns out that the dealership has this guy whose job it is to drive people around whose cars are in for work.  So we got chauffered around for two days while we waited for the car to be finished.

(Tracy takes over…) So our new driver, John, was the best tour guide Australia has to offer.  Being an Australian citizen who is quite happy to share the wonders of his country with friendly tourists like ourselves, the first place John drove us was the Billabong Koala Park.  Port Macquarie has the highest urban koala population in the country (and I guess that means the world) and the town is therefore host to a Koala hospital and a koala sanctuary where we headed off with John as our guide.  We just happened to be dropped off at 10:29AM and the koala feeding session started at 10:30AM.  What more perfect timing could we have?  So, this ended up to be a park where peacocks and kangaroos and emus roamed around freely and begged us for the corn that we neglected to buy when we walked in.  So we took some pictures and spent quite a bit of time petting koalas and looking at birds and stuff.  The koalas were very soft and didn’t flinch at all when touched.  I’ve heard they can be vicious, but they get high all the time on their gum trees so they usually have a care in the world and are quite sedated.  John even told us that every once and a while you will just hear a “thump” because a koala was so high that it just fell out of its tree.  Anyway, we ordered some fish and chips and then bought some corn to feed the kangaroos.  But, by this time the sun was high in the sky and all the kangaroos were hidden under trees in an area that we weren’t allowed to go in, but they could freely roam in and out of.  So Tommy and I spent about an hour trying to lure them out by throwing corn at them and making all sorts of noise.  We even fed the corn to ducks to try to make the kangaroos jealous.  And we spent about 10 minutes doing crazy whooping dances to try to make them come out to see what was going on.  Unfortunately, none of this worked.  But, we found one little wallaby sleeping in the corner of the area that we were allowed in and we went over and woke him up and made him eat all of our corn so we got some cute pictures. 

After we has satisfied our Australian animal cravings, we gave John a ring and he picked us up and then took us downtown where we walked around the bay a little and had some Mexican food to quench Tommy’s nachos cravings.  We got back to our hostel and Tommy, being in a very social mood, recruited half the place to play pool with him.  Apparently we divide the balls as “solids and stripes,” Irish guys say, “spots and stripes,” and Aussies say, “lows and highs.”  So it was a bit confusing at first, but all worked out well.

04/02/2004 – Some of the Australian guys we met playing pool graciously offered to give us a lift to the Port Macquarie lighthouse (which is not all that impressive in itself) and we set off on an 8km walk back to town.  This took much of the day, but our car wasn’t supposed to be ready until afternoon so we had the time to spare and it turned out to be well worth it.  We walked north from the lighthouse and first came upon a gorgeous secluded beach that sometime we will come back to.  We then walked through the rainforest a bit, where Tommy played Tarzan for a while, and came out at Miner’s beach, our first experience with a nude Australian beach.  We then proceeded to Shelley’s Beach, where was saw a huge lizard called a goanna.  Then came Nobby’s Beach where there was supposed to be a blowhole that kills lots of swimmers but we saw no such thing.  There is an obelisk on top of a piece of land that juts out into the ocean that memorializes those that swam near that beach.  We climbed up there but still saw no blowhole.  We ended up cutting our walk a little short because we were hungry and we stopped by the koala hospital to catch the second half of a tour.  The hospital rescues koalas from bushfires and other disasters (sometimes disasters called Subaru and Toyotas) and nurses them back to health.  After a while, John came to pick us up and we went to pick up our like-new car and head to Hunter Valley, wine region of Australia. 

05/02/2004 10:03AM – This morning we woke up in the beautiful mountain town of Katoomba, about 1.5 hours west of Sydney in the Blue Mountains.  So far this is the most welcoming hostel that we’ve stayed at, although it is not the place with the best accommodation.  The owners are really nice and I recommend the place (it’s called Blue Mountain Backpackers), but Tommy was allergic to it and all the bathrooms were being used when I woke up and I really needed one and I waited for a while and never got one and finally gave up and used a bathroom elsewhere.

            Yesterday we spent the day touring the wineries of Hunter Valley, New South Wales.  It was great fun and I learned a whole lot about wine and the process of making it.  We went to a total of 5 or 6 wineries and tasted all sorts of different wines.  We took a tour of McGuigan’s Winery and learned about the process and that some grape trees (vines?) live to be hundreds of years old.  I had no idea.  They also made us wear hard hats on the tour for no reason at all.  We ended up purchasing two bottles of wine: a McGuigan Shiraz and a Rothbury Traminer.  Tommy did all the tasting because I was driving and let’s just say by the end of the day he was a little tipsy.   

            After the winery touring we jumped in the car and drove for 3 or 4 hours down here to Katoomba where we set off to see some mountain scenery.

06/02/2004 10:35AM – At the tip of town in Katoomba, there’s a great lookout called Echo Point, which faces the scenic blue mountains and a memorable rock formation called the Three Sisters.  We saw this yesterday morning.  There were lots of other tourists around, mostly Asians actually and I kind of felt like it was something that you should be able to savor alone.  We figured that there were so many Asians because the idea of three sisters is so foreign to them that they just had to come and see it.  But, it was pretty amazing and we got some great pictures.  There’s a “giant staircase” that leads down to the Three Sisters from Echo Point, and Tommy climbed down there and then climbed a little on the formation, but I was too tired to do it.  That’s okay though because he made a friend while he was climbing.

That’s pretty much all there is to do in Katoomba besides more intense sports like canyoning and mountain climbing.  Tommy really wanted to go mountain climbing but I wasn’t feeling all that well and chickened out.  I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if he finds someone at school who likes to climb and disappears with them for a weekend to Katoomba.

            So, we took off pretty early for our drive to Canberra.  It took about 4 or 5 hours to get to Australia’s capital city, and the scenery changed from the lush greenery we saw in northern New South Wales to a very dry brown arid flat land (like Turkish bread).  The sun grew really hot and shade was hard to come by.  Canberra is actually in the Australia Capital Territory, which is a little piece of land cut out of New South Wales.  The city was planned out and centers around a manmade lake called Lake Burley Griffin.  We are staying at the Canberra YHA, which is a youth hostel right next to a nature reserve and it seems pretty nice and private.  Last night when we got in we discovered the Pancake Parlour which was open late and we got some really good pancakes, although they weren’t enough for either of us.  That’s a big problem I have with Australian restaurants, they never give you enough food or drinks.  No drinks are ever free refills and the portions are really small.  At home I’m lucky if I can eat half of my meal.  But here, I almost always finish and am wanting more.  And they don’t have lemonade here.  They have 7up, which is like carbonated water with lemon flavor added and they call that lemonade.  Anyway, at one place in Katoomba I had found a drink called citron which was lemon juice and water, so I added my own sugar which I had stolen from a McDonald’s and I was very pleased with myself.  But, the Pancake Parlour in Canberra had “Old Fashioned Real Lemonade” on the menu and I ordered it and it wasn’t quite as good as at home but it was normal and very good.  Tommy didn’t have such good luck though.  He ordered apple juice and on the menu it had two sizes and two prices, somewhere around 2 bucks for a small and 3 for a large.  So the waitress asked what size he wanted and he said, “The bigger size,” and she goes, “Oh, you want a pint.”  And when she came back she had brought this huge glass of apple juice and went, “I had to look up the price on this one cuz it’s not on the menu.”  And when Tommy asked how much she goes, “Five dollars and ninety cents.”  And it was really funny cuz he got a six dollar apple juice.