Australia Day

Australia Day was January 26. It is the equivilent of July 4. Here in Yeppoon, there was "The Great Australia Day Beach Party." Which included craft vendors, food vendors, kid's games and rides stage entertainment including magicians, clowns, puppets, bands, fashion show, and a sand castle competition. Danny and I were there from about noon to 8 pm. It was capped off by fireworks at the end of the night, fired from a boat just off the beach. From the food vendors, there was donuts, hamburgers, steak sandwiches, thai food, and ice cream. The craft markets were a lot like what you would see in the states, with jewlry, toys, and other hand crafted stuff. There was a lot of people there! One of the coolest things they did was have airplanes fly over the beach and drop tons of candy for the kids, you should have seen them running after it!

Botanic Gardens and Zoo

Hi everyone! Yesterday we went to the Rockhampton Botanic Gardens and Zoo, they are at the same location. It was really nice, really spread out. Admission was free! They have plants from around the world, and themed gardens including a Japanese Garden and Tropical Fruit Garden. There is also a large wetland there, with lots of unique birds. At the zoo, we saw koalas, wombats, chimps, emus, kangaroos, wallabys, different birds, and some native Australian lizards, which were mostly from western australia. There was a tree from Africa called the "sasauge tree," see if you can tell which picture it is! There were butterflies that were light brown on the outside of their wings, then a brilliant blue on the inside.

President-elect Obama made the paper yesterday, with the letter to his daughters, inaugeration, and discussing his economic responsibility. It took up about 4 pages in the newspaper! (The newspapers here are pretty big, usually about 70 pages, I would guess.) They listed about 5 television stations that would be covering the inaugeration, which will start here at around 11 pm on Tuesday, with the actual event taking place at about 3 am.

Beach Pictures

I am attempting to put some video up, forgive my amateur taping techniques. There is a video of some little crabs, there are millions of them! It is funny how they just pop out of the sand if you sit still long enough. There is also a 360 of our beach.

There is a giant yucca plant in our back yard, as you can see from the picture of Danny standing next to it! There is a picture of a jellyfish that washed up onto shore. then a picture of a cliff, from which we took the beach pictures.

Main Street

Here are some pictures of James Street, or "main street" where there are a lot of shops, bakeries, restaurants. It is right next to the beach. There is a cafe called Maggies where we eat sometimes, and had really good banana and strawberry smoothies there the other day!

The lizards are getting bigger. This one was in our back yard, it is about 2 feet long. According to my research, it is a Sand Goanna, a species of Australian monitor lizard, and can reach up to 4.6 feet long! It must have been a young one.

The mailman rides a little motorcycle from house to house with "saddlebags." It looks pretty funny to us, but I imagine our little white trucks would look funny to Australians who came to visit the US!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year Everyone! We went to Rockhampton to bring in the new year, finally were able to eat at a Pizza Hut, met another couple and played some pool, had a great time! Then we went for a walk on the beach in Yeppoon. You can see the stars really good, and there is only one constellation we recognize: Orion. Eventually, we'll figure out what some of the southern constellations are.

Driving at night, there are practically no bugs hitting the windshield! There are however, frogs. Big ones, little ones, just sitting on the road. We avoid what we can. This little lizard was just outside our door one afternoon.

On the 30th, we went to a Rodeo, advertised as a professional touring rodeo. It was okay, not what we expected. All they did was bull riding, and the bulls were pretty small. The arena was about the size of a county fair arena. It was in a open air morton like building, with no breeze, so it was hot! There was a band there called the Bostocks, they were pretty good.