Australia (Part 1)

This is going to take a few dozen posts, so be patient. Also, regularly scheduled life events will probably be mixed in, so NO COMPLAINTS! ;) I will be sprinkling in what the kids wrote in their journals. For homework for the 8 days of school they missed, they each kept a journal. They came out AWESOME! I wish I had a scanner so you could see some of the art work!

November 8-10th

The first part of the trip was the plane ride to Sydney. Good news: only one flight. Bad News...well...there was LOTS of bad news. We don't want to dwell on it, though. We do NOT recommend EVERY flying on Jetstar, however.

The flight was 10 hours. We left on the 8th in the morning and got to Australia in the afternoon on the 9th. The dateline throws everything off. (remember that when you read about the flight home!)

We made it to our hotel just fine. We stayed in a small apartment right in the heart of the city. It was perfect except that the trash collectors came down the alley at 3am EVERY MORNING!!

Here is what Teresa had to say about our first day in Sydney (from her journal)

When we woke up, we were busy because we were going to Paddy's Market (the Australian Swapmeet). We bought 2 Australian art things and 2 boomerangs.

The art is very nice. I got one of them. It's called "Heart of my people" by Andrew Williams. On it are pictures of stingrays, sharks, fish, honu, frogs, platypus, seals, alligators, or croc's and much more.

The boomerangs are my brother's. One of them is to hang on his wall. They both have kangaroo's on them. That's all for the morning.

We went to Manly this afternoon. We went to a beach, but could only go up to our knees. That's because the tide was coming in. If you were a really good swimmer you could go in up to your waist.

Oh yeah, did I mention that in the morning, very strange noises? They came from a bird. At first, we thought it was a cockatoo, but it wasn't. It was a huge (bigger than this book) black raven! That's all of our first Day in Sydney!

Actually, she forgot to mention that we also went to the Chinese Garden in Darling Harbor. It was very nice. It reminded us a lot of the garden we went to on our trip through Montreal.

Let me know if you don't like this, but I am going to try something new. I put together a slide show, so the pictures will scroll by. If you want to look at one, I think you can click on it to stop the show and make it bigger.

Enjoy!