Cheers Australia!

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Tyrn and I spent our last few days in Australia with our amazing friends in Brisbane.  This is Craig showing Ty the joys of Bundaberg Rum (Craig's home town north of Brisbane).   Both Craig and Jill are teachers who met while teaching in Italy.  It was great to relax with these cats before making our last journey on this trip.
Jill making omlettes for us.  
Tyrn laughing uncontrolably when the omlette flipping technique didn't work out as planned and the goopy eggs were everywhere.  They still tasted good and we absolutely enjoyed Jill and Craig's Aussie/Canuck hospitality.
The day before our flight home.  Packing and making sure we are ready, I always seem to rake my nerves the night before something big.
We started our trip home in the Brisbane airport at 6:30am on May 22nd.  We then flew to New Zealand in 3 hours (long story) and then layed over in Auckland for 4 hours.  We are still looking all pretty and chipper at this time, but just wait another 50 hours when we finally stagger through the Edmonton arrival gate.  
We then flew from Auckland to Melbourne (4 hour trip) and layed over for another couple of hours.  We then took off for Dubai our long 14 hour flight and layed over there for 2 hours.  This connection was pretty tight and we ended up running through the insanely busy Dubai airport, but made our flight with time to spare.
Next we boarded our flight to London Heathrow a 7.5 hour flight over Europe.  
Our final connection was 3 hours long and we spent it working out a ticket mistake with Air Canada.  Apparently, Emirates (who we were flying with) hadn't actually booked our tickets with Air Canada for our last flight to Edmonton.  Of course when they check the plane is incredibly full, but they got us on Air Canada flight 899 somehow.  
FINALLY, we are headed home!  Our last flight was 9 hours, making our total transport time 52 hours and our total flight hours 41- yikes!  (I know, we are INSANE)  We landed in Edmonton at 5:25pm on May 23rd, however that would be the 24th in Australia time.  
Waiting for us, as promised, with a sign was Tyrn's little bro Matthew.  Unfortunately, one of our bags didn't make all of our connections with us and so we had to fill out a lost bag claim.  This took forever, because like the good Canadians we are, we let everyone go in front of us in line making us the LAST two people in the terminal.
This is my parents and Matt wondering where we are?  All the other folks were cleared out by the time we pushed through those arrival doors.
We aren't looking as pretty anymore.  (Yes, that is how they wear thier socks in Europe these days.)  

We are HOME!

Tyrn's mom has been planning our welcome home supper for about 3 months now and it was FANTASTIC!  We had steak, greek salad, delicious potatoes and all the trimmings.  Of course all I really cared about was the cheesecake for dessert.

We're back!  We will be posting a "back in Canada" post soon, but we were a little hectic when we first got here.  Now we are staying at Ty's parent's place while we sort things out.  

We are happy to be home and looking forward to seeing everyone very soon!

K

Magnetic Island

To finish up our last day in North Queensland, Scott took us to "Maggie", just a 20 minute ferry ride from Townsville. We had an awesome last snorkel as you can tell. The dark area is actually coral and there are loads of tropical fish. The island is truly gorgeous.
Big thanks to Scott, Lisha, and Dante for making our trip to north Queensland so great.
And on another note, as proud Canadians, Scott and I got up at 3 am to cheer on our boys in the International Hockey Championship gold medal game against Russia. Scott provided the Team Canada jerseys and subscribed to an online feed so that we could watch the game in Australia. We went into his office so that we could cheer as loud as we wanted, as one should. Unfortunately, the stars were misaligned and the Russians squeeked past us, claiming the gold this time.

T & K

Camping with the Crocs

Welcome to north Queensland! That's how Scott and Lisha and new baby Dante greeted us when we pulled in to Townsville. Australia has been a sort of cultural buffer for us between Asia and Canada, stealing my reverse culture shock thunder, which I've actually been looking forward to. Scott and I used to get into trouble together as high school and uni kids in Alberta, but have since lived worlds apart, becoming the fine young men we are. Anyway, it's been great to hang out with Scott's family and talk hockey, and share our outsider views on life in Alberta. So much for the big shock of being home.

Scott loaned us his car and camping gear and we headed up the coast from Townsville for a week. The less travelled road from Townsville to Cairns is amazing and beautiful. We saw tons of Ozzie wildlife, but fortunately or otherwise haven't seen any of the promised crocs yet.

Paluma Camp Ground.

We took the 1992 Toyota Camry "luxury offroading" (one of my guilty pleasures) up the mountain side to some natural rock waterslides. Sorry, the pics are on our other card!

Tully Gorge (aka Tully Gully to Kelsey)
Although it gets between 4 and 10 METERS of rain annually, we did have one sunny day to play in the river. This picture is at one of the free public use BBQs that we learned how to cook on. It's trickier than you'd think.

On the way down the mountain I cruised in neutral. At the bottom we turned the car off to look at the map, and the rest is history.

Palm Cove Campround near Cairns

Yup, this guy just walked out the bush to see how things were going. He's a monitor lizard.

Making the most of a rainy day. Croc sandals are definitely not made for hiking in the rain.
On the way back down to Townsville we took a detour through the Atherton Tablelands. Words can not describe how beautiful it is up there. If you look really close, you might find the cow grazing on one of the hillsides.
Millaa Millaa Falls
And last but not least, snorkeling, diving and swimming at the
GREAT BARRIER REEF!

From Cairns (camping in Palm Cove, where the Croc sign above is from) we took the "reef daytripper" a catamaran sailboat into the Pacific to the Upolu Cay. This was the very FIRST time that either of us has been snorkeling and we got to start on the barrier reef. It was beyond fantastic.
These are batfish and they like to be stroked and fed bread from the boat. They are actually a very large fish, especially for us country bumpkins.
The water is AMAZINGLY clear! It was mesmorizing to just watch the water and the reef. Here is me diving off the boat.
The water temperature was about 25 degrees so you could hang out for a long time.
This is Kelsey snorkeling for the second time this day and she is looking a lot better here. It was a bit stressful the first time as she was trying to figure things out. As a semi-competent diver, I tried to give her some tips and help out when we first jumped in the water. Well, that was the marital trial you would expect, to say the least. As you can imagine it was a bit of a scene and so an instructor stepped in to help out. But, we prevailed and pretty soon were expertly floating hand in hand over the reef. We saw like ?? different types of coral, LOTS of fish and a big sea SNAKE, which are really poisonous we found out later.
I'm so glad I took the chance for a scuba dive. It's pretty much like riding a bike, once you're down there it all comes back.

I found Nemo and a bull ray that looked about as big as a car, among other things. Unfortunately I struck out on the sharks and turtles.

During the day the boat fed and watered us and on the way home they provided wine and cheese. An elegant ending to one of the most fantastic days, truely memorable.
We plan to do a little snorkeling off an island near Townsville when we go back to visiting with Scott, Lisha and Dante.

T.

The Big Banana

Our great couchsurfing hosts in Coffs Harbour had a few suggestions for stops on our way up the coast. First, The Big Banana. Kelsey was STUFFED when we left there.

Just a few minutes down the road is a newer housing development built on kangaroo habitat. It looks like the roos weren't displaced too much, because they hang out pretty casually in peoples yards.

We stayed with another couchsurfer in a small town called Lennox Head. We took our books up to this peak and read on the grass. It was a hard day!


Then, to the beach for some frisbee.
And surfer watching. (the whales arrive in a couple of weeks, so we had to settle for surfers.)


Australia is great.
T