Finally in the Land Down Under

Here it is Day 11 since we have arrived in Australia and I will be honest, we have not done a whole lot! After three months of being on the go constantly, it has been nice to just relax a bit and sit in one spot. We are staying with our friends, Warren and Julie, who live about a 200 meter walk away from the beach. You can see the ocean from their balcony, which makes for a real nice morning (and afternoon and evening) view!

The beach also offers a nice place for a challenging run. That happens sometimes, but not often because I prefer to hide from the sun!

So, because not much has been going on, this post does not have much adventure in it, but I will show you some of the things that I have been up to and noticing in the past couple weeks.

I’ll start with my favorite, the birds. Normally I hate birds, and am still not a huge fan of magpies, but it is so cool to have these creatures come visit every single day looking for their snack of minced meat and bug parts. In addition to the birds pictured, we are also visited by Cockatoos and Green Lorikeets. My mission is to get a decent photo of them too.

It is currently the summer holidays so the area around the Sunshine Coast is just packed with people. The Noosa area is currently running free buses throughout the area so it’s been fun trying to figure out where those will take you. The public transit system also includes a ferryboat that goes up and down the river. We figured we’d try to avoid car traffic by taking this ferry instead, but it was just as congested. This area reminds me a lot of the Florida beach culture.

A couple staples around here that I find interesting are the koala crossing signs and the repurposed phone booths. They have set up all the phone booths to have free wifi and make free local calls, which is handy for tourists. In addition to koala signs, I’ve also seen kangaroo crossing and flying fox crossing signs, but, as of yet, have seen none of them trying to cross the road. The koala numbers have been greatly reduced since the fires last year so it will be unlikely to see one of them, but I did see a kangaroo who was quite far from the road while riding the bus once!

We checked out a wild west type town called Pomona one afternoon.

We met up with Warren and Julie’s friends at a neat little brewery called Black Flag, from which I captured a cool sunset and later snapped a cool shot of the full moon.

There are more adventures to come but for now it has been fun catching up with Julie and Warren, meeting their family, watching lots of Yellowstone and exploring this area. Stayed tuned!