An Amazing Trip to an Amazing Country- New Zealand by Suzanne

We knew that we didn't want to be down in Australia for 3 months without getting over to New Zealand.  We didn't have long, but we were able to squeeze in 6 days to visit Queenstown, NZ.  It is on the south island, and we had an amazingly beautiful trip over there.  The over all feel is a little like a small Colorado ski town, but also surrounding a huge lake, lots of very green pastures within the mountains covered with sheep, and so so much undeveloped, untouched beauty.  It is the beginning of summer down here, but we were still on the chilly side a lot of the time, and our weather the first two days was quite rainy.  The first day we drove our rental car around the lake, and caught many great views of some Lord of the Rings filming sites.  We stopped at Arrowtown, the New Zealand gold rush town, and had a wonderful lunch at the New Orleans hotel.  We stopped at the birthplace of Bungy Jumping and watched some people jump.  It is over the Kawarau River, another gorgeous view.

We drove to Glenorchy, named one of the most beautiful drives in the world.  The drive is all around Lake Wakatipu, the large lake along which Queenstown is set.  Here are a few of the places we stopped along the way for pictures.

These bright yellow flowers cover the landscape of New Zealand!  

This was at Twelve Mile Delta, along Lake Wakatipu.

This dock was in Glenorchy.

This is Pig Island and Pigeon Island, in the middle of Lake Wakatipu.

The second day we were able to ride up the mountain on the gondola, called the "Skyline" here, and did the luge, like an alpine slide in the states.  The views were breathtaking, and the luge incredibly fun.  That was a highlight for the kids!

Another day we did the world famous "Shotover Jet Boat Ride."  Everyone you talk to who has ever been to Queenstown talks about this ride.  And it surely lives up to it's reputation!  Such a thrilling ride, the boats hold about 14 people and go VERY fast through a narrow canyon through the Shotover River.  You get very close to the sides of the canyon, and they do several 360 degree turns as well.  You must wear rain coats and life vests, and you definitely get wet!  We all went on the first ride, and then they make the second ride so inexpensive that you can't pass up another ride.  I didn't do the second ride so that I could take some good pictures.  You can tell from the pics how much fun everyone was having!

You can see how narrow the canyon was!

Our final full day in Queenstown, we took a tour of one of the many Sounds along the west coast of New Zealand.  We drove our rental car two hours to Lake Manapouri, caught a boat ride across the lake, got on a bus to take us over a pass, and finally boarded a cruise through Doubtful Sound.  It was a very long day of travel!  But the views through the sound were amazing.  Taking the boat through very steep high cliffs that were created by glaciers was a truly incredible experience.  As you can imagine, Ethan took "just a few" pictures.  Here is a small sample.

It was a little windy!

We saw some dolphins swimming through the sound!

There was also a fur seal colony on a few rocks just inside the sound, close to the Tasman Sea.

We were thrilled to see a couple of penguins left on this rock!  They had found 23 penguin nests on this rock earlier this year, but our captain thought that they were all gone by now.  Coming back into the sound we found this mom and baby penguin posing for us!  

The trip was definitely a highlight of our experience down here.  New Zealand is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.  There was so much undeveloped, beautiful landscape.  It's very unlike anything in the US, where coastline is all developed fully!  

So we are on back in Sydney and in our final week here.  Ethan is finishing up things with work, we are beginning to pack, and doing our final things here in the city.  We are excited to be home for Christmas and get back into our busy, hectic schedules.  But the time here we have had has been the time of our lives, so many experiences that we will hold dear for the rest of our lives.  To unplug from the craziness of our lives was nice, but we did of course realize that there is no place like home!  

Luna Park on Friday by luke

Luna Park was awesome, there were so many rides, but my favorite was the tango train. It went so fast while playing music. The worst thing was dinner. Dinner was horrible. It was like rubber on a bun that was died pink. There was also a cart roller coaster that was turning every second. I also got stuck on a ride for a whole 15 minutes. After that they offered us free ice cream. We said yes, went on our last rides, and ended the night with five big scoops of ice cream on five delicous waffle cones.

Luna Park lights up very pretty at night!

This is me and my brother and sister on the Tango Train!

Here is me stuck on the ride!!!

         BY LUKE

Luna Park: By Brady

Well, one of our latest adventures was Friday night and we took a ferry to this really fun circus park called Luna Park. It is conveniently located at the other side of the harbour just under the bridge. I had a really good time and we all went on some rides that were pretty dizzy. There was a mini cart ride that whenever you turned, you felt like you were going to fall off of it. Then there came my favorite little ride of all....... The Tango Train. It was like a  ride where you get in and you go backwards once and forwards twice while listening to some radio music( The ride was going in a circle). It was so awesome I thought we were there for like 10 minutes, but we were really there for almost 4 hours. Big difference, right? Its nothing like Worlds of Fun because Worlds of Fun is way better but its the closest thing we've got down here. And my worst part of the night was the food. Australians don't know this but I think alot of them don't know how to make a good AMERICAN hotdog. The people there were basically putting a rubber sausage in a bun and called it a hotdog. Anyway thats all for now but I'll see you soon. 

Great view of the bridge and the opera house from the ferris wheel!

This is us on the Tango Train, our favorite ride!

These guys on stilts were funny!

Port Douglas by LUKE

Last week, my family went to Port Douglas, which is up in northern Australia near the Great Barrier Reef and we saw a lot of amazing things.  We went swimming at Four Mile Beach and it was so shallow it felt like I was 50 feet tall. After that a big wave came and all of our stuff got soaking wet, but we still made it a fun day at the beach.  We all survived the stingers (boxed jellyfish) at the beach also and by the way they are the deadliest creature  in Australia.  Me and all of my family members stayed in a resort called Rendevouz Reef.   It was a really cool resort with four pools, a breackfast cafe, and a playground, but I still miss home a lot!!!!!!!!!!!  We all still have a lot of adventures ahead of us in New Zealand too. Still I miss home a lot, and especially my amazing dog phog.

This is us at the beach.

This is me at our pool under water.

Port Douglas by Elise

We went to Port Douglas.  It was fun.  I miss home.  The pool was awesome.

We also got to hold a crocodile.  He is cool.

My favorite part of Port Douglas was the snorkeling.

We are coming home soon.  I can't wait to see my friends!

Elise

A Little Rainforest with a Big Suprise: By Brady

I'm exausted because we just got back from Port Douglas, a small tropical town in northern Queensland. While we were there, we went to a really amazing place, called Hartleys Crocodile Adventures. When we got there we went straight to the Crocodile boat tour. Here are some of the crocs we saw on the tour.

 I can't believe we got these pictures.

Pretty good pics, right?  At one point there were 4 crocs going for the fish head and they were all jumping rapidly.  Next we went out of the tour to the Crocodile feeding where they fed saltwater, then freshwater( BTW, the crocs in the pictures are saltwater.). There were like 40 of each kind during the feeding and they were all surrounding the person feeding them. Around 2'o'clock we went to see a snake show and a crocodile hunter wannabe named Duncan was pretty brave because he was dealing with the most venomous snake in the world, The Inland Taipan. Guess what..... one millileter of its venom can kill 125,000 mice. Here is what it looks like.

Guess what we also got to do, hold a baby saltwater crocodile. It was awesome.

Well I got to go, I'll keep you posted on our next adventure.

A few days in Paradise...Port Douglas, Queensland, AU

From the time we knew we were coming to Sydney, Ethan was determined to get to the Great Barrier Reef.  Because his work schedule is packed tight, we could only squeeze in a few days for the vacation up to northern Queensland.  We left Friday night and flew up to Cairns.  Then it was about an hour drive from Cairns to Port Douglas, the town we stayed in.  We had a wonderful villa with a gorgeous tropical pool right off of our balcony.  It was most definitely paradise!

The climate up there is much more tropical, it is the one place in the world where the rainforest meets the reef, the Great Barrier Reef, that is.  We had 3 full days to enjoy.  The first day we just decided to hang at our pool and also took a picnic lunch to the famous "4 Mile Beach" right on the coast, which is along the Coral Sea.  This beach was unlike any other beach we have been to.  First of all, there was a net enclosure within which we could swim.  It is stinger season down here, and we have learned that the box jellyfish, also called the sea stinger, is the most deadly animal in Australia!  They are very large jellyfish and if you get stung, it is most likely fatal.  We definitely stayed within the swimming enclosure!!!  But the waves are very small, and you can go out really far and still quite shallow.  Plus the water was much warmer up this far north, so it was my first time actually swimming since we've been here!

You can see the mountainous coastline that meets with the beach.  The sand here was much finer than down in the Sydney area.

You can see the swim enclosure behind them, that white floating line.

Check out the sign behind the boys.  Stingers!  But it sure didn't keep people away.  The beach was quite crowded, you felt very safe inside the swim enclosure.

That night we had dinner at a restaurant along the strip of the town of Port Douglas.  It was a really cute town with just one main strip full of restaurants, reef tour and rainforest tour storefronts, and shops.  

Our second day was our Reef tour!  This was definitely the highlight of the trip.  We went out with Quicksilver Cruises, the largest tour group out of Port Douglas.  They took us for an hour and a half ride on a very nice and large boat out to the reef.  They recommended that we all wear their "stinger suits" so that we would not get stung in case there were stingers.  We never saw any, luckily!  They have a large platform that stays out at the reef, and they can do scuba diving from the same platform.  We all chose to snorkel.  They also had an underwater viewing site that you could see lots of the reef from without going into the water.  And then there was another option, a semi submersible boat that drove around the reef with the seating about 5 feet under water so you could see a lot of the fish and reef as well.  Elise, Brady, and I took that ride and our highlight was seeing 3 different sea turtles!  They were really cool to see, but Ethan had our camera at the time so we didn't get pictures of those!  Ethan had an underwater camera and got lots of really cool pictures of the reef and some gorgeous colorful fish.  

Brady snorkeling...

This is me, Suzanne...not a great picture but I wanted proof that I did in fact snorkel!  :)

Ethan...he is NOT laying on that coral, by the way...

Luke didn't like the fins or the snorkel...but still managed to snorkel the entire time with Ethan!

Such vibrant colors!  They were so beautiful!

Look at this starfish!

The kids with our boat in the background.

Modeling the stinger suits!

I know that's a ton of pictures...if you are still with me you deserve some reward for hanging in there.  Guess what your reward will be?  Some more pictures of the most amazing CROCODILES you've ever seen!  Our third day we decided to go to Hartley's Crocodile Adventure!  Brady has wanted to see some crocs since we got here.  This was definitely the place for that!  They were like nothing we have ever seen.  This place was crawling with crocs...both saltwater (who do eat humans) and freshwater (who don't eat humans.)  We rode this boat (picture the Animal Kingdom safari boat ride) but with real crocs.  The tour guide was quite the stereotypical Aussie.  I wish we had videoed part of his commentary!  He was hilarious.  He would hold a stick out over the water attached to the head of a fish, trying to get the crocs to come get it.  They sure would come, and jump up to get the fish!  We got some great pictures of them...

This was the boat we rode.  Those are windows on the bottom half...we were NOT going to be that susceptible to them!

Jason, our Aussie "Crocodile Hunter" tour guide...

They look fake.  I know!  Those are REAL!

These were the saltwater crocs.  They are much larger, have less pointy noses, and Do see humans as a food source.

The kids posing by the WARNING sign.  I have never been so paranoid in a "theme park" or zoo of the animals getting out!  It sort of freaked me out.

The Saltwater croc feeding time.

This is a freshwater croc.  At least they are smaller, and can't fit a human in their mouth!  They don't chew their prey, so they don't consider humans a food source.

The obligatory kangaroos found in every Australian wildlife park!

We got to take our picture with a real baby croc!!!

Another "Crocodile Hunter" wannabe...Duncan.  He is holding an Inland Taipan, the #1 most venomous snake in the world.

Look at this croc checking out the kids helping with the snake show...this totally freaked me out!!!  He seemed ready to pounce on these kids.  There was a 5 foot glass wall in his way.

What an amazing trip we had!  I have to post a few other pictures from some stops along the coastal drive, more hotel pool swimming, and another dinner in town.  Too many photo ops plus a photo crazy dad, makes for thousands of photos for this trip!!!

You just can't drive along this coast without stopping for some photos.

We are holding little starfish.

We will be home to KC in less than 3 weeks.  Time is flying now and we look forward to coming home for Christmas, however a trip to Queenstown, New Zealand first.   There will be more pics to come I am sure.