December Aussie Style

Our first trip to the Beach

Merry Christmas everyone. It's December 31st and it's the hottest day of the year, 97 degrees F or 36 C. The weather report called for 40 C but it hasn't made it to that so far fortunately. The Australians call it "stinkin" hot.

Thought we'd catch you up on our latest trip. The second week of December we had the opportunity to travel to a town called Port MacQuarie in New South Wales (the east coast of Australia, just above Victoria). The trip was officially for the U.S. exchange personnel conference, but families were encouraged to come along and it was a nice location so all of us piled in the car for the trip. It was about exactly 1000 KM one way or about 610 miles. An easy conversion is to multiply the number of Km by 6 and drop the last digit, that gives you an approximate conversion to miles. We broke the trip up into two days on the way up and stopped in the coastal town of New Castle. The following day we had a fairly short 4 hour drive into our hotel. When we checked in and went up to our room we found a three bedroom apartment that was larger than the house we lived in while in Kentucky! Nice to put it mildly, with a stunning view to boot. We all had a wonderful time and the week was over much too quickly. We departed Friday morning and did the drive straight home in one day since the girls had a gymnastics event that Saturday.

Below we've capture our favorite memories from the beach:

Rebecca's favorite memory from the beach was saving some sort of ocean creature called a Spanish Dancer. As the tide came and went they would be washed up and stranded on the beach. Rebecca took great joy in liberating these beached invertabrates.

Kim's favorite memory was the view from the balcony of our room. This wasn't just any balcony it ran the entire length of our apartment from the living room to the last bedroom.

Australia is known for its waves and surf and Katherines favorite memory was using her new boogy board to ride the waves. All the girls got boards of their own and I have to admit were pretty good at catching the waves. They also had a good time seeing how far the tide went out. They had a bit of school even on holiday because they had to look up what caused the tides to ebb and flow.

Mary says her favorite part of the trip was seeing the dolphins that passed by our room heading in the mouth of the river each afternoon. One evening one came along by itself and hung around quite close for several minutes playing and feeding on small fish I think. Sorry no pic of that one.

Phillip had some worries with his foot during the trip that kind of put a damper on beach activities, but his favorite part in addition to all the above was probably watching the surfers/body boarders/surf ski riders. It was neat seeing people actually surf and doing it well.

We're supposed to go back to the same spot next year. Now we know what there is to do and what we want to do. The girls are interested in renting a boat and going fishing. Some other options are Camel rides on the beach, offshore fishing, and a wildlife refuge with Koalas.

Yesterday we went bushwalking, the Aussie term for hiking, at one of their national parks where we went sledding back in winter. The next edition will cover that.

Happy New Year! May everyone's life be richly blessed this coming year.

Arriving Australia

View from the backyard on our first day in the house.

This Blog is where we're going to share all our adventures with family and friends while living in Australia . The house is always open for visitors, but if you can't visit then the next best things is seeing where we are and what we're doing for the next couple of years.

Hope you enjoy. More to come!

Phillip, Kim, Mary, Rebecca and Katherine
December 2005