Sydney : Part 1

Jeremy had another off day on sunday so we decided to go to Sydney! 

We have very special friends who live in Sydney and we are so lucky that we were able to see them and spend the night at their house! The Finks met my parents when they moved to Philadelphia in in 1986. 

 As Tamar told the story: She and her husband had just moved to Philadelphia with their 3 year old son Daniel. They knew no one and enrolled Daniel in pre school at the JCC- where I also happened to be attending pre school. On the first day of school my mom came over and introduced herself and invited them over for the Jewish holidays when she found out they had no family in Philadelphia ( my mom is the sweetest person in the world)
Daniel and I became good friends went to school together until they moved back to Australia 3 years later.

As soon as we arrived in Sydney Tamar took us on a " Randee tour" of Bondi beach, which is the town they live in.  If you don't know my mom a " Randee tour" is when you see lots of sights in a city in a short amount of time and do lots... of ... walking!! 

LOTS!  

Yes, that is a swimming pool ON the ocean. Tamar took swimming lessons there as a child.

10/31

A  few years ago my sister EJ studied abroad in Spain for the summer. Before she left I bought her a bunch of different greeting cards, wrote inside each one, and then wrote a date on each envelope. I told her she couldn’t open up the card until the date written on the outside of the envelope. I spread out the dates so she would have a card to open once a week or every other week while she was away in case she ever got homesick or needed something to cheer her up! 

A few years after Spain EJ moved to Costa Rica for a year, so I sent her with another stack of cards with dates on the envelopes!

As Jeremy and I were leaving for the Airport to go to Australia my mom handed us a stack of cards for each of us with dates on the envelopes. We opened our first cards on the plane but had to wait to open the rest.  

We were all sitting around on October 31 discussing how strange it is that they don’t celebrate Halloween in Australia when I remembered we had cards we were allowed to open on 10/31!   

It definitely brightened my day to get to open a card from my mom! 

Looking forward to opening the rest over the next few months….

Thanks mama, I love you!

Kangaroos

 I have been saying for months that while I was in Australia 
I just wanted to see one kangaroo with a baby in her pouch! 

While we were at Pebbly beach I got to see so many babyroos in pouches
 and even pet the mamas. 

It was so exciting and fascinating  all at the same time! 

 Our camp site was covered with all of these Kangaroos all day/night.
 There were about 10 of them just hangin around. 
We got food and were able to feed them and pet them. 
The kangas would come up to our picnic table and just sit around with us.
 It was absolutely amazing. 
The kangaroos in Pebbly beach are very tame and used to humans.
 The roos that we see in Canberra are wild so we can’t get close to them or even attempt to pet them.

 

This is my new best friend. She kept coming back to me all day. I have named her Sally Jo.

Pebbly Beach

We finally had our first Australia adventure! 

We all had the day off on Sunday and decided we needed to leave Canberra and go on an adventure! 7 of us decided to drive to Pebbly Beach and go camping for the night. Pebbly Beach is about 2 hours away from Canberra – However it took us closer to 4 ½ to get there, since we got lost [about 3 separate times]

Getting lost has become a part of our daily life.  It is basically guaranteed that we will get lost every. single. time we leave the house. None of us have smart phones or a GPS so we have to rely on these things called paper maps- remember those?!

Once we arrived at our camp site the long car ride seemed worth it! We stayed on a beautiful site that had a tropical pool, bar, cabins and was right on the most gorgeous beach.  As I was unpacking the car when Jeremy came running over and told me they found a bunch of kangaroos just laying around a few feet away. We all ran over and were able to sit around with the Kangaroos and take pictures! Little did we know we would spend the rest of the day with these roos! 

After our exciting encounter with the Roos we all put on sneakers and went rock climbing down the beach. It is hard to even describe the beach. The camp site is basically in the woods and then all of the sudden it just opens up to this amazing teal blue ocean water. The beach was surrounded by beautiful and intense rocks that we went climbing on. The pictures don’t even do it justice but I hope you can get an idea of what we saw.

 

to be continued.. 

game 1

Last night was the first game of the season for the Canberra Cavalry!

The Parliament

On Tuesday Jeremy and Eric were asked to do an appearance at The Parliament in downtown Canberra. We were all excited to have an opportunity to go visit The Parliament! Canberra is the capital city of Australia and reminds me a lot of Washington, DC. 

The Australian Baseball league has formed a landmark partnership campaign promoting : Be the Influence: Tackling Binge Drinking. This event was held so the media could hear the Minister's discuss the campaign as well as meet a few of the boys from the Cavalry baseball team. Here are a few pictures of the boys playing a quick game of baseball with Minister Mark Butler and Minister for Sport Kate Lundy.