Hello Sunshine! Sort of...

Hello again! Well it's been quite some time since the last blog post and so much has happened! Let's see if I can remember everything...

We spent about a week hanging out with the Edwards. They live in Yeppoon which is about 30 min. outside of Rockhampton. This area is the beef capital of Australia, so it was only fitting that we should meet a guy from Nebraska! We hadn't been doing much but relaxing and taking it easy in Yeppoon so we decided to venture out and explore Rocky for a day. Unfortunately for us, that day happened to be a Saturday. We didn't realize until too late that almost everything in Australia shuts down over the weekend, especially in more rural areas. So after an exhausting time of being stranded and trudging through the entire city in some pretty miserable heat (which is a whole 'nother story!) we decided to call it a day and catch the second to last bus home. We were sitting at the bus stop moping about how everything we tried that day had gone wrong, but apparently we looked like we knew what we were doing. This guy with a good ol' midwestern accent came up to us and asked if we knew where to catch the bus to Yeppoon. We should have told him to stay away from us so that our current streak of bad luck wouldn't rub off on him. Instead, we joined forces and all missed that bus together! Turns out the correct bus stop was about a block down the street. Well, we had 3 hours to kill and didn't have anything else to do, so we grabbed drinks and then walked over the river to check out the empty race track with Nebraska. It actually ended up being pretty cool to spend the afternoon swapping travel experiences, especially because he was one of few Americans we've met so far over here. All's well that ends well, I guess!

By that point it was time to move on, so we repacked our stuff, left most of it behind for safe keeping with the Edwards, and flew down to Brisbane. As a side note, we totally over packed. You never realize how much crap you don't really need until you have to lug it around everywhere with you! I even picked up a new backpack in Brisbane, which now holds all of my worldly possessions.

The highlight of our time in Brisbane was the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, where we got to play with the koalas and kangaroos all day. The kangaroos were my favorite. They are hilarious and love a good scratch on the neck almost as much as Honey does! Don't tell my dad, but I fully plan on bringing one home. I know how much he loves keeping my pets in his yard. Lexie even gave us a surefire way to catch one. Check out how to catch a kangaroo! After our animal adventure we finished the day with a tour of the XXXX Brewery. Zach and I have both seen our fair share of breweries and this one was pretty top notch. Then at the end of the tour you got 4 beers and a full Aussie BBQ. I also got to stand behind the bar with the cute bartender, so that pretty much made my night.

From Brisbane we hopped on a train up to Queensland's Sunshine Coast. I had a bit of a wardrobe malfunction on the way and gave the entire train platform a full show of my cheeks and the panties I was wearing that day. What's traveling without a little embarrassment once in a while? We stayed the first couple days in Noosa Heads, which is a lovely little touristy town. The hostel, Halse Lodge, was a really awesome creaky old timber building that sat in the woods just off the beaten path. Staying there felt a bit like being away at summer camp.

On Australia Day we had arranged to meet up with my dad's family friend, Margaret, and her family. They live in Twin Waters, which is just down the coast from Noosa. It had been raining pretty steadily for the past several days, so we couldn't do an outdoor beach and BBQ Australia Day, but Margaret's fiance, Adrian, gave us the full Aussie menu with wonderful new things like Tim Tams, ANZAC biscuits, Vegemite, and Bundy rum and ginger beer. He even helped us understand the game of cricket, a bit. Meanwhile, the rain had turned into a full fledged storm and we were definitely not going to be able to make it back to our beds at the hostel for the night. We basically had an extended slumber party while we waited out the residual of a tropical cyclone. Margaret's kids, David (12) and Josephine (9), were delighted to have us for movies, board games, puzzles, arts and crafts, and manicures. Zach didn't want a manicure for some reason. We also had plenty of time to hear some great stories about my dad and uncles and life on the farm in Wisconsin... including one involving a particularly potent batch of cat wormer! We couldn't have asked for better company to wait out the storm. However, we were all very happy when the clouds finally lifted. Up until that point Zach and I hadn't seen a single ray of sunlight on the famous Sunshine Coast and we were beginning to wonder if the name wasn't just a clever way of luring in tourists. We had two days of nice weather; just enough time to be able to check out the hinterland town of Montville, visit the kids at their school, walk along the beach, and eat some delicious, fresh off the docks seafood before we had to make it back down to Brisbane to catch our flight out to Western Australia. Our parting meal with Margaret and crew was at a little Mexican food restaurant in Brisbane. The food actually wasn't half bad, but we promised to return the Australian hospitality with some real Southwest cooking when our parents come out for a visit!

We made it out to WA and have been learning lots. From the harvest trail to horse racing, nothing is quite what we expected. We both feel a little wiser as a result. I'll write more about that next time. Stay tuned!

G'day Australia

Hello everyone! Zach and I are alive and well in the land down undah! We've been here for about two weeks now and have pretty much just been tourists so far. Here's a recap of everything-

The flight over on China Eastern Air was so loooonnnnngggg!! We went kind of a round about way and flew 14 hours to Shanghai and then another 10 hours to Melbourn before taking the last quick flight on Qantas into Sydney. Our advice? Spend the extra money and fly Qantas 22 hours directly into Sydney. The service wasn't bad, but there's nothing like a language barrier to make a long trip seem even longer. We couldn't sleep at all on the first flight to Shanghai, so we zoned out the entire time to the inflight entertainment, which was basically a 14 hour foreign film fest. They showed around 8 different movies in as many different languages and each one was a complete stereotype of the culture it was representing. We had everything from a racy French film to Bollywood. After that, arriving in Bondi fit the theme of our trip pretty perfectly.

Every image we had in our heads about the oz way of life prior to arriving was definitely a reality there. The hostel looked like a retro beach house, we were checked in by a laid back beach bum with long wavy hair, and then invited to a BBQ the hostel was having. We dropped off our bags and walked right down to the beach. Bondi beach is where all the beautiful Aussies gather. Seriously, we have never seen so many beautiful people in one place in our lives! Everyone was perfectly bronzed, fit, and walking around in neon colored swim suits. No shirt or shoes required, anywhere. We, on the other hand, looked like the walking dead after 30+ hours of traveling. We had just enough energy to walk along the beach a bit and meet a few people at the hostel BBQ before crashing.

After recovering the first couple days in Bondi we decided to move into the city to see what Sydney had to offer. We stayed at a really cool hostel right at Central Station in a converted rail car. This also gave us a super convenient starting point for walking around pretty much the entire city. There were seriously times I was convinced my feet were going to fall right off from all the walking. Even Zach was feeling it. The highlight of Darling Harbor was a $14 million giant rubber duck... only in Sydney! And the world's largest IMAX screen was amazing. Zach doesn't like 3d movies, but I forced him to see one on reefs with me and even he was pretty impressed. I REALLY wanted to go back and see The Hobbit after that, but there are only so many hours in a day... even in Australia, where there do happen to be more hours in a day!

We also found out that the Edwards were in Sydney, totally by coincidence, visiting some friends who were also from New Mexico. (The Edwards skied on the Santa Fe ski team back home, and had relocated to Australia only months before we did, for those of you who don't know.) Zach and I had never met the Edwards, so we decided that a day trip to Manly Beach was the perfect way to introduce ourselves in oz! Kristin recognized us on the crowded beach immediately. She said we looked just like Lexie and our mom. We had such a great time hanging out for the day with two other New Mexican families. If it weren't for the giant expanse of water right in front of us, we would have felt right at home. We also decided that we really should travel with a small New Mexico flag so that we could have staked our claim on the beach!

The Opera House was, of course , ridiculously cool. What you don't realize when you're looking at it in pictures is the amazing texture of the white sails. They catch the light differently throughout the day and there's just so much more depth to it than the glossy white that we thought it would be. They were also in the middle of what they called "Summer at the House," so they were playing up this never ending festival atmosphere, complete with an outdoor taco cantina and DJ. Every day at 12:30 they released the remaining unsold show tickets to be sold for just $25 each, a really great deal. Zach and I decided to watch La Soirée, which was incredible! It was sort of a new age circus sideshow, with unbelievable acrobatic acts, a lot of humor, and a little bit of strip tease all thrown in the act.

After our night at the opera house we had been in Sydney for quite a while and were starting to feel a bit claustrophobic. Sydney is great and has plenty of cool things to see and do, but at the end of the day it's still just a really big city. We still had to stay around the area to pick up our bank cards when they came in, so we decided to catch a train into the Blue Mountains for the weekend. We stayed in Katoomba, which was originally built as a mining town and looked like it must have been bustling back in the day. The forest was closed when we got there because they had been having a drought and extreme fire danger... sound familiar? So we walked around town a bit and then went to a local watering hole with our friends Alex and Chaja where we watched this big burly guy, Pugsley, play keyboard and sing like he was straight out of New Orleans! The next day was much cooler and foggy and our hostel informed us that the forest had opened up a day early because of the weather. We gathered Alex and Chaja and went for a hike. It was really cool walking through a Jurassic forest with the mist rolling through all around us. We all felt like we were just about to see some prehistoric creature around every corner. Once we got to the big staircase by the three sisters someone called down for us to come back up. It was a park ranger standing with another group from our hostel. Turns out the forest was still closed and we had all been misinformed. But it actually worked out alright, the ranger was a really nice guy. He was one of those salt of the earth kind of Aussies. He didn't fine us and we got a pretty informative nature walk on the way back. There was pouring rain the rest of the afternoon so we stayed inside and watched movies and played board games. We got our big hike in the next day and I think it finally hit us both that we get to call this place our home for the next year.

After the Blue Mountains we traveled up to Yeppoon in Queensland to visit with the Edwards some more, but this post is already way too long so I'll tell you all about our time with the Edwards in the next one. They're a really awesome family. Mom, Kristin has offered to be our surrogate mother while we're here so we don't get into too much trouble. Hope you're all doing well and enjoying the skiing at home! We sure miss it, but then again, maybe not too much ;)

Love, Nickie and Zach

P.S.- We'll get some more pictures up on Facebook as soon as we can!