« July 2007 | Home | September 2007 »
After our stint in Sydney, we headed north to the Whitsunday Islands in northeast Queensland. My sister works at Club Med on Lindeman Island there. Over the past four years or so, many of our family vacations have ended up being wherever she's working at the time (Florida and Colorado before this), so it's not so much of a vacation for her but it's good to have the whole family together. Our plane landed in the morning on Hamilton Island and we had a few hours to kill before we caught the ferry to Lindeman. On my sister's recommendation, we made our way to the animal park there, mostly to see the Koalas.
Holding and getting her picture taken with Willy (the Koala above) was definitely one of the highlights for Cousin Lindsay. After that, we made our way to the bakery by the marina for some Australian pastries, which Lindsay had been researching all over Sydney. We sat outside with a few friendly cockatoos until it was time to walk back to the dock and ride the ferry for a half an hour.
Meghan greeted us with the Club Med wave at the dock, and after the quick tour of the village we started eating and drinking and didn't stop for the next five days. Now I know how our cats feel, scheduling everything around when we're going to eat next.
The next day we ferried back to Hamilton Island ("Hamo," as we learned the locals called it) to sail around the islands for the day. We had a great captain who took us north from Hamo to a nice quiet bay where we went ashore and took a short hike to a great little beach. We spent about an hour exploring the island and seeing what little things we could find running around in the shallow water. The sand was some of the strangest that I've ever felt; it was muddy and almost sticky, but didn't really cloud the water. It was actually quite comfortable to walk through.
The rest of our few days on Lindeman were spent hiking, relaxing and playing sports like golf, tennis, archery, and other sports that none of us really know much about. Of course, this didn't prevent us from cleaning up at the sports awards ceremony on Thursday night. I shared the golfing medal for "Most Improved" with Lindsay, Maura got the yoga medal because she was the only one who had showed up the previous day, and my Dad took two medals - one for archery and the second for most consistent golfer because they couldn't award one for "worst golfer." All of our golf medals were simply because we made friends with the instructor, a Boston area native and a big Red Sox fan. Plus, we were some of the only guests whose names he knew.
We ended most nights with dinner and the nightly show, which was anything from a kids show to full acrobatics. Yes, the picture below is my sister working, and no, the photo hasn't been rotated.
After the show, the Club Med staff ("G.Os") would lead most everybody in the nightly Crazy Signs, or choreographed dances. I usually made a beeline for the bar at that point, although as the picture below shows I did get into it by the pool on our last day there. My excuse is probably just that it was only 11:30 and the pool bar wasn't open yet.
After Lindeman, it was back to Sydney for one more night and then Maura and I headed to Tasmania for the last leg of the trip.
Here's the one big group picture that I got on the top of Mt. Oldfield, the highest point on Lindeman Island.
Jerad posted this in Travel | Comments (2)
I'm finally ready to write a little bit about what I was up to all those days in Australia. It took me almost a week to completely recover from my jet lag, but the trip was worth it. We were there for two weeks and I felt like we could've easily spent another two months looking around. Our trip was split up into three parts, which I think I'll put in three different posts. We started out in Sydney for four days, then we went to Lindeman Island in the Whitsundays, and finally we moved south to Tasmania (Tassie) for the last four days of the trip. So, I'll start with Sydney...
Yeah, so, the Sydney Opera House. It may be touristy, maybe we missed some other amazing part of the great city, but there just aren't many views better than standing on Circular Quay and looking out at the Opera House to your right and the Harbor Bridge to your left. Our hotel in Sydney was in The Rocks district, which meant that we could walk out the front door of the building, peek around the museum across the street, and see the Opera House jutting out between the trees in the park. We took a tour of the place on our first day there. It was great just to see all of the bits of the building up close, including two of the seven theaters in the complex, but we also learned a lot about the long history of it being built. It sounded like it was Sydney's Big Dig. We learned that, despite the land being on this beautiful outcropping into the harbor, before the Opera House was built there the land held a parking garage. Ugh.
Day two and we're in our rental car heading up to the Hunter Valley, New South Wales' wine country. We stopped at quite a few wineries and "cellar doors" (basically, wine tasting buildings or estates for wineries who don't have vineyards in the area) that day. We thought that we'd have to get a map and do some work to figure out where each next stop is. We realized pretty quickly that we could easily wander from one free tasting to the next without too much thinking, since there were signs everywhere pointing in every direction, and each place was separated by only a few hundred yards. Needless to say, we had a lot of good wine (me, the driver, less than the rest of my party), cheese, and just about any other food that lends itself to unlimited sampling.
Then, at dusk, right before we hit our last winery, my cousin looked out the window into the field and shouted...
...kangaroos!
There was a herd of them with maybe 50-60 just standing around in the field grazing. So, of course, I grabbed my camera, hopped the fence, and tried to get a bit closer. I got about halfway out into the field and was fiddling with my camera when I looked up and saw that all of the animals had stopped grazing and were staring right at me. I was wondering if I needed to put on my boxing gloves, but I took two more steps and they all took off in the other direction. That's when I started snapping photos, like the one above, like mad.
Driving on the left was fine except for a moment of confusion pulling into the parking garage that night. Fortunately, it looks like Avis hasn't charged me for the scratches on the front bumper.
The next day was spent in the Blue Mountains and it seems that I've neglected to upload any of those pictures to Flickr yet. Basically, it was almost like the Grand Canyon if it were covered in eucalyptus trees. There, we did some short hikes, saw some amazing rock formations, found a tree filled with cockatoos, and stopped at the Olympic Park on our way back into the city.
The last day in Sydney before heading north was spent walking around shopping, checking out the wonderful Powerhouse Museum, which features science and design, and more and more good food. So, I'll sign off here with a few more pictures of the Sydney sights. Next, it's on to the Whitsunday Islands.
And one more...
Jerad posted this in Travel | Comments (1)
Although some would argue that New Adventures in Hi-Fi was their first live album, R.E.M. are releasing their first real concert CD/DVD in October. I'm not sure how exciting this is now that you can already get more live music than you could ever want if you know where to look, but I guess there's something nice about an official release. Along with a lot of the recent R.E.M. releases, like In Time and And I Feel Fine, it does smack of the record company trying to make back some of their big investment in the band, but I'm still going to buy it, of course. I just hope that it's better-done than their last DVD, Perfect Square, from the 2003 tour. That one gave me a headache with all of the quick camera cuts.
Jerad posted this in Music | Comments (1)
Spending fifteen minutes among fellow runners along Sydney's Cirular Quay while the sun starts to peek out behind the Opera House.
Jerad posted this in Travel | Comments (1)
www.flickr.com
|
