Canberra Nature Park

Saturday we had early practice which left us the evening to finally explore our little niche of Canberra.  Canberra is called the Bush Capital.  The Bush is what we call the woods, forest, or being in the middle of nowhere!  All around us are different mountains (I think they are tall enough to be considered that) and wilderness everywhere.   The early practice gave us a perfect opportunity to go explore the area which has “Nature Parks”  all around us.

 

There is a trail right by our apartment that leads up a hill through a neighborhood to the Canberra Nature Park.  There are a lot of Magpie (swooping) birds, parrots and cockatoos. 

At the top it opens up into pretty amazing views.

We spotted some things that we hoped were kangaroos on a far hillside and walked down a small trail to cut across and get to the area which ended up being a horse paddock. 

Something super cool to me is that these Nature Parks are super rugged.   We met a friendly couple and asked where some trails were and they responded by pointing to the ENTIRE LANDSCAPE and said, “They are wherever you want them to be,  just watch out for snakes.”  We smiled and nervously laughed (if you know me I am TERRIFIED OF SNAKES).  So that’s when we learned fences didn’t matter, as long as we were brave enough to walk there we could go!  

- Jeremy

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page”

4 days, 2 plane rides and 1 bus ride later, we finally arrived in Australia!

Caroline dropped us off at the Los Angeles airport around 8pm Tuesday night and met up with Eric and Adam [two boys Jeremy played with in Williamsport and Lakewood] who also will be on his team in Canberra!  

Our plane left LAX around 11 pm on Tuesday night and we arrived in Sydney Australia around 8am Thursday morning! It was a loooooong bumpy 15-hour flight. If you’ve ever met me you probably know I have an extreme fear of flying.  It was definitely a huge challenge for me to fly 20 hours over a 3 day time period but I’m so thankful I did it. Thank you to Jeremy for being patient with me every time the plane made a strange noise or got bumpy and I was convinced we were about to crash :)

After we got off the plane we met up with 2 more American players from the team and the 6 of us hoped on a 3-hour bus ride to Canberra. Canberra is the city we will be living in while we are in Australia. It is the Capitol City of Australia, located half way between Sydney and Melbourne.

Once we arrived in Canberra the GM of the team picked up Jeremy, Eric and myself and took us to our Flat [We don’t say apartment here] Our flat is located directly across the street from a cute shopping square. There are a bunch of cafes, bakeries, a bank, a huge supermarket, and a great used bookstore / café which also has live music on the weekends!

An hour after we arrived, Jeremy and Eric had to head over to the baseball field for their first practice! I don’t know how they practiced after traveling for over 24 hours plus jetlag!

While they were gone I went over the shopping center and went to the bank, supermarket, and café! I had desperately been trying to find some wifi since we landed so I could contact my parents in Philadelphia. None of us have working cell phones in Australia so our only option was finding wifi for email. Australia has hardly any free wifi. It is very different than America. I’ve learned that most families don’t have unlimited wifi Internet in their homes like we do back in the states. Thankfully the used book store/ café has wifi so we can come over here for the time being and email everyone back at home!

 

We will try to take post pictures of our apartment and neighborhood over the next few days!

Santa Monica

On Tuesday we woke up to a beautiful day in California and decided to spend the day at the Santa Monica Pier [Unfortunately Caroline couldn’t join us because she had to work most of the day]

It was a gorgeous sunny fall day at the pier with great views of the Pacific Ocean. We walked around, saw lot of birds that scared Jeremy and ate some good junk food! 

After Caroline was done working we all went to In N out Burger. We ordered off of the “secret” menu and it was as good as everyone says it is!

As soon as we were done eating we had to head to the airport to catch out 11pm flight to Sydney.

Caroline – THANK YOU for being an amazing friend, tour guide, and host. We are so glad you were the first stop on our trip! We love you and can’t wait to see you once we’re home!

Our Journey Begins ...

yesterday, at 5am, we left 140 union and began our journey to australia. the first stop on our trip was 2 day stay in LA to visit our good friend caroline. once we landed and met up with caroline we headed over to the LA observatory.

later in the afternoon we went over to the La Brea Tar Pits - aka a Tar Zoo. it is a really interesting story if want to learn more : http://www.tarpits.org/