I'm now back from my trip but have some time to catch up on the rest of what I got to experience. Heading out to Australia, Eric and I flew 10.5-11 hours to the other side of the world. We left on the 21st of July and got to Australia on the 22nd crossing over the International Dateline. We caught a connection flight from Sydney to Brisbane and got there pretty late. still had a bit of a drive out to Surfers Paradise before we could finally settle in to our apartment. I'm glad that Gayle, Sara and Carly (daughters of the president of the company (from New Zealand)) and Ryan came out to pick us up from the airport. They made us a sign that said Hooch & Gaylord (the nicknames they gave us - I'm Hooch) and held it up so I ran to break through it and was unsuccessful at my attempt.
We were very fortunate to stay in the Tallest Residential Building in the World on the Gold Coast! It's called Q1 and the 20th tallest building in the world with 87 stories!
(You can see it in the picture above, it's the tall one in the distance). They took us up to the sky room that is only on the 79th floor but a great floor with glass windows all around to see the skyline and the rest of Surfers. It was dark so we didn't get very many pictures of the ocean from up there, but still was cool.It was a really nice building (5 Star) with really fast elevators, I heard they can go up to 25 mph. They built it with the design to match the tourch for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
So while in Surfers Eric, Ryan and I were able to go on an tour that included boating out to 2 different islands. We walked through an island to the other side where we played around on the beach. The sand had a lot of silicone (or something) in it, that made it squeek, it was cool.
There were sand dunes that we jumped off and I also collected some shells from that beach. They said that there was a chance we could see some wallabies (small kangaroo-type animals) or other animals but we only heard birds. We saw some tracks in the sand of a wallaby but didn't see one.
We also stopped at another beach and played cricket. It was fun to learn a new sport. We went swimming along the shore to some rocks and there were a lot of fish all hanging out in this area, they brought out chips and threw them in to feed them. We were
also fortunate that they had some goggles that we could use to go down and see them. Very cool.The Australia part of my summer ended up being quite a great experience and we were able to do a lot. Besides this Island Tour we also went a Wildlife Sanction place called Currumbin. They had a lot of Koala bears, Kangaroos that you could pet and feed, and crocodiles. They also had Tasmanian Devils, Wombats (furry rodent-type), a Dingo and birds. It was fenced off, kind of like a zoo but very cool to see all these native animals all in a small area.
It was cool to see the kangaroos, they seemed to me like a mix between a dog and a deer.
I was a little nervous feeding them but I have my way with animals and can make friends easily (especially when I have food).They also had an Aboriginal dance/show in the park. First a guy came out and played the Didgeridoo and then 3 guys came out and performed for us (not real Aborigines). It was cool though, I have a video of them dancing and also recorded the time when they pulled up people from the audience to come dance (Eric got called up and had to dance. He did a pretty good job, it was funny).
