From the Big D to Oz

My friends from Dallas came down for a visit this past week! They did a tour of Australia in to weeks. I am very impressed with them. The visited Sydney, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Kings Canyon , and Adelaide all in two weeks. Good on 'em! We took them to Cleland on Saturday for a fun filled day of cuddling cute Australian animals. Above is Justin and Amanda getting to know a kangaroo!

Annie, Brooke, Justin, and Amanda feeding some more hungry kangaroos. You would think these guys hadn't eaten in like a year. As soon as they saw us, they came hopping on over to us begging for some food!

Justin made some furry friends!

How cute is this wombat. He kept rolling over on his back. I am sure he wanted his belly scratched! Too bad you can't pet these little guys! They bite!

Justin with a Red Kangaroo. They are huge!

I love kangaroos!

Me, Amanda, Annie, and Brooke with four lovely roos.

Us on top of the Bluff at Victor Harbour

What a great few days with my friends from back home! It was great to catch up with them. I work with Annie and Amanda at Baylor and Brooke is Annie's roommate. They spent just four days in Adelaide and Justin and I tried to show them a good time! I think we did a pretty good job. Their highlight was holding koalas at Cleland. They are back home now. Silly girls are going back to work on Monday after the long flight back home! This weekend we are going to Bob and Anne's for lunch or dinner I forget which! Then next week is Easter holidays and we are off to Kangaroo Island for four days! That is about it! Miss you all!

A Weekend at the Fringe

So this weekend was spent mostly at the Fridge Festival. The Fringe has been going on since February 19th in Adelaide. It is the second biggest Fringe in the world second only to the Edinburgh, Scotland one. For those of you who don't know what a Fringe Festival is, let me tell you. It is essentially a giant festival for the arts. Comedy shows, short plays, music, street performers, puppets. You name some sort of arts related thing and it is there.

We went on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. All very different shows. Thursday was a band called My Friend the Chocolate Cake. They were great!! They had a piano, violin, cello, bass, mandolin, and drums. Their music was really beautiful. If they were selling CDs I would have bought one! On Friday we saw a two man show call There. It was weird! Justin and I left having no idea what we just saw. The show was in like a tractor trailer crate. I guess it was acting or performance art. Very strange. On Saturday, we saw a show called Up Skit Creek. It was a bunch of comedy skits. It was pretty funny. Two of the skits had the Australian mythical creature, the Bunyip, in it. Which Justin and I thought was pretty funny since we had been talking about it so much with my dad and Theresa!

Sunday, we went over to one of my co-workers for lunch. It was fabulous! She fed us very well! We were stuffed! She had some great cheese and fruit platters and then a great Aussie barbie! We also went to church Sunday night. It is sad because we only have a few more services to go to until it is time to go home! :(

That is about it from here. Tomorrow Annie, Amanda, and Brooke my friends from back home arrive in Adelaide!! I am pretty excited! I get to leave work early to pick them up! They have already been to the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney, and Uluru, so I can't wait to talk to them about it!! We miss you all!

Second Visit to Melbourne

So after we dropped off Dad and Theresa at the airport in Melbourne, Justin and I stayed the rest of the weekend there exploring! This was our second trip there and we have one more planned at the end of April. The building above is Flinders Street Station. I think it is a really cool old train station.

This is Federation Square. There is a high possibility that there are pictures of these in the blog I did the last time we were in Melbourne.

This the Eureka Tower. One of the tallest buildings in Melbourne.

While we were there, the Food and Wine Festival was happening. We didn't go, but we thought this giant plate and fork were pretty cool!

On Sunday morning we were taking a walk and came upon this male only toilet in the middle of the city. There was no female toilet in sight. Behind the green wall is just one single urinal. This was the oddest placed toilet I had ever seen!

Our first stop on our Sunday excursion was to Captain Cook's Cottage. Captain Cook was one of the first Europeans to discover Australia. He came into Sydney and name Botany Bay. This was his house when he lived in England. It was built in like 1777 and it was brought over to Australia piece by piece and was reconstructed in Melbourne in like the 1930s (or I could be way off and they rebuilt in the 1800's I forget!)

This is the kitchen.

This is one of doorways in. I liked how they made a little welcome mat out of stones!

This is a statue of Captain Cook. He was a tall man, standing at 6ft. 3.

Out in the garden you could take pictures and send home a post card of yourself like an olden days person. This is me as a guy.

This is Justin as a girl!

Our last stop of the day was to visit the Exhibition Hall. We tried to visit last time we were in Melbourne, but it was closed. It is a World Heritage Site because it is so old and it is still used as an exhibition hall today.

Inside

Inside.

So that is all! This weekend should be nice and relaxed On Tuesday, my friends from Baylor are coming to visit!! I am excited to see them! I have less than a month left of work and we have just over a month until we come home. I am pretty sad about leaving here! Australia is by far the coolest place ever!! We miss you all and see you all soon!

Tasmania Part II: Bruny Island Cruise and Mt. Wellington

This is us in the car on the ferry over to Bruny Island. We went on the Bruny Island boat tour.

This is the water around the dock. It is crystal clear.

This is one of the many stops on our boat tour. This is called the McDonald's golden arch because of the golden colored rocks!

Beautiful scenery! There were cliffs all around us with crystal blue waters. The pictures don't even do it a bit of justice. This was some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen.

We founds same dolphins and this is everyone on the boat trying to get a look.

Ah, here is one now! This is a common dolphin. There were tons of them, but it was hard to get a picture because they jump out of the water so fast.

Pretty rock formations.

How beautiful is this??

Cormorants on a rock.

Rock formations. They have a name, but I forget what they are called.

Amazing!

New Zealand Fur Seals. There were about 2000 living on this rock. These are just a few!

Gorgeous!

Ah, more dolphins. These are bottlenose dolphins. The water was so clear, you could see them swimming below us!

Here is one swimming.

This is the isthmus between North and South Bruny Island.

One of the most beautiful beaches in the world!

On top of Mt. Wellington in Hobart.

Mt. Wellington

Me and Justin at the summit!

Tasmania Part I: Pt. Arthur and Tassie Devil Park

We arrived in Hobart, Tasmania and we came to to this fish place, Mures, for dinner. It was delicious! Everything was so fresh and tasty! We ate here on our last night in Tassie too.

This is Dad, Theresa, and me by some statues outside of the restaurant.

Tassie devil sign on the way to Pt. Arthur.

We visited Pt. Arthur Historic Site. This is where all of the convicts came when they were sent over from England back in the 1850s and 1860s. It was a pretty creepy place. The convicts weren't treated very well and it is a sad part of Australia's history, but we all have sad parts of our countries histories. This is a picture of the barracks where the convicts lived. The really bad guys lived on the first floor and the better you were the higher the level you stayed.

This was a chapel in one of the prisons. All of the convicts were led in and they had partitions between them so they couldn't communicate. I could barely see over the ledge!

This is just one of the ruins left today. At one time there were over 200 buildings and now there are just 30.

More of the ruins. If I remember correctly, this might be of the hospital.

We took a short boat ride out in the harbour and this is the passage from the harbour into the open ocean.

View of Pt. Arthur from the boat.

This is the church. All of the young boys (aged 8 to about 11) built this wooden insides of the church. A fire came and destroyed that, but the stone work is left behind.

This is the guards watch tower.

This is what is left of the convicts barracks.

Ah, much happier place now! Tassie Devil Conservation Park. Here are two of the little guys sunning themselves.

Look how cute he is! Too bad he could bite your hand off! They have the strongest jaw of all the animals in the world!

Going in for a nap, but what isn't showed here is a little brawl between these two!

This is hilarious. You see the two feet sticking out of the mom's pouch. I think the joey dived head first into his mom's pouch!

Sleeping tassie devil!

Justin and Theresa posing with a Tawny Frogmouth bird. They are really cute!

View of the open ocean from a lookout on the way back to Pt. Arthur and Tassie Devil Park.

A beautiful beach we found!

So we did so much this past week, I am doing it in three posts. The next two will be on on Bruny Island tour and me and Justin's Melbourne trip.