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Farewell to the Land of Oz

Friday, March 30th, 2007

Jan 19-25

We arrived in Darwin and checked into our hostel, Frogshollow Backpackers, at 4:30 on Friday afternoon and Claude went straight to a used car dealer to get a quote for our car. The guy gave him a lowball offer of $1500 (yikes!) but was then nice enough to tell Claude that he’d probably have better luck selling it privately by putting an ad in the Saturday paper (the office closed at 5PM). So he raced to the newspaper office and got his ad in at 4:55PM; the clerk was not impressed that she had to type it in manually since he’d missed the deadline. Our phone started ringing at 7AM the next morning and by noon we had gotten about 15 calls and had two buyers bidding against each other. In the end, we were able to sell the car to a nice Filipino couple for $3100 and only lost $1000. This meant that our car only cost us $15/day while we were in Australia – not too shabby! [read on]

Alice Springs to Darwin

Monday, March 12th, 2007

Jan 15-19

Once again, no pictures, just visit our web album.

My only regret as we left Uluru was that the weather had been cloudy and rainy while we were there and, while that made for slightly more tolerable temperatures, we weren’t able to enjoy watching the famous rock change colours as the sun rose or set. The rain continued on and off throughout our drive to Alice Springs where we stayed for a few days before commencing our final run up the middle to Darwin. The further north we went, the more it rained, at times in torrents that blinded us and forced us to slow to a crawl as the baked clay refused to absorb the deluge which instead formed small rivers across the highway and threatened to swallow our car. We stopped for lunch at Wycliffe Well, a tiny outpost that is famous for its well-documented UFO sightings. The walls of the diner were plastered with newspaper and magazine articles detailing the many flashing lights and floating objects that had been spotted in the sky and there was a journal in which travelers cold document their own personal sightings. The kids were delighted with the tacky life-size aliens and spaceship that adorned the parking lot and Alexa begged to stay at the campground so we could watch for UFO’s in the night sky. Unfortunately, we still had miles to go before nightfall and had to hit the road, which was still very much under water. [read on]

Outback Adventures II

Monday, March 12th, 2007
Jan 13-15 In the interests of time (I've got a lot of catching up to do) I'm not posting any photos in this blog and you can view all of our Outback photos at our web album:
[Continue reading this entry]

Adventures in the Outback

Monday, March 12th, 2007
Jan 8-12 After leaving Adelaide, our first stop was Rawnsley Park Station, a working sheep farm that was one of the original settlements in the Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide. Over the years, the Station had attracted ... [Continue reading this entry]

Sydney to Adelaide

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
January 2-8 Now that the holidays were over, it was time for a headlong dash to Darwin where we were scheduled to fly to Bali on January 18th. That gave us very limited time to enjoy everything in between so ... [Continue reading this entry]

Sydney’s Diamond Jubilee

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
December 31 When New Years Eve finally arrived, we took an early train into Sydney and arrived at Macquarrie’s Point around 11AM (along with about 10,000 other people).
From Holidays in S...
After standing in ... [Continue reading this entry]

Sydney for the Holidays

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
Dec 24 – 31 As the days wound down to Christmas, I reflected on what I was doing this time last year – namely, stressing out about Christmas sales while rushing around madly to get all the shopping and wrapping done. ... [Continue reading this entry]

Sunshine Coast to the Gold Coast

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
Dec 9-22
From Queensland, A...
After our adventures in the Whitsundays and Fraser Island, we were ready to chill out for a while. We spent the next few weeks working our way down the ... [Continue reading this entry]

Fraser Island II

Saturday, February 17th, 2007
Dec 7-8 On Day 2, we had to get up really early and leave by 6AM in order to drive on the beach before the tide was too high. Our plan was to drive to Indian Head, at the north ... [Continue reading this entry]

Fraser Island I

Monday, February 12th, 2007
December 3-8 You would think that after a busy and expensive week of sailing that we would have taken it easy for a while. However, geography dictated that our next adventure follow closely on the heels of our last. ... [Continue reading this entry]