Australia Trip Synopsis (Nate)

Map of Australia
Zoomed in on where we were:

Australia was awesome, I highly recommend it. I feel very blessed to have been able to take such a wonderful vacation with loved ones. 

I really liked Australia!  The people were nice, the language and accent is cute, the culture is very relaxed and kind of wild west crossed with upright English.

The country side was wonderfully green, with a wide variety of plant and wild life.  We got to see wild kangaroos and whales, but had to go to a wildlife park and aquarium to see the other funny animals.  Kangaroos are the coolest.  They're so calm because they have no natural predator in Australia, so they aren't afraid of things like most animals are.  We saw part of a baby kangaroo in the pouch of a captive kangaroo, but didn't get a good look at it.  We did get some great shots of a baby koala in a different park though!  Cute!

In some places we had large rolling hills and in others it was completely flat.

The weather was perfect for me, 50's-60's with alternating between sun and rain.

The cities were a nice blend of historic and contemporary.  Interesting architectures, plenty of technology to balance out the mostly agricultural society.

Actually, in some ways Australia is more advanced than we are.  Almost all gas stations had pumps for liquid propane, and their transit system was impressive.  In the cities, they had digital speed limit signs which could be changed by their transit system to moderate traffic for fluctuations due to car accidents, rush hour, special events.  Some of the bridges had radars pointed at each of the lanes and had large digital displays that indicated your current speed so you couldn't make an excuse to police officers that you didn't know how fast you were going.  They use portable automated speeding ticketers so that the locations of speed cameras could not be memorized.  For truckers, they had special speed averaging ticketers that uses cameras to identify vehicles in two different locations (say 20km apart) and measures the amount of time it took a truck to get from one camera to the other, thus using the known distance to calculate average speed.  If the average speed is over the speed limit, they get tickets, very clever I thought!  And of course they have round-abouts, we need more of those.  But I'm not a big fan of the multi-lane round-abouts, just the 1 laners.

Of course they drive on the left side of the road, but the steering wheel is on the right side of the car, and there is no consistent location for the blinker switch, sometimes its on the left side of the steering wheel, sometimes its on the right.  Due to the large amount of driving we did, I did log a good number of hours on the country roads, but no matter how many times I turned on the wipers instead of the blinkers everyone still got a good laugh.

I learned that Australia is a big place, roughly the same size as the 48 states but with less than 10% of the population, roughly 20 million people, and a good portion of that is in their few major cities.  So as a consequence, we didn't do some of the common tourist things like The Great Barrier Reef, the Outback, or Ayres Rock, unless you fly everywhere and have more time you just can't do it. Becca's Aunt and Uncle were wonderful tour guides and we did get a good tasting of southeast Australia country side and 3 of their major cities, Adaleide, Melbourne, and Sydney.  Sydney I was very impressed with, very pretty and something for everyone.

We also learned that Aussie's don't eat ketchup with their french fries (I mean chips), but if you want some you have to ask for tomato sauce and you might get one or two small packets, and sometimes it costs extra, and usually it's runny.

McDonald's was rather big there, though they've given themselves a new image as McCafe.  Rather good actually, I wonder why they haven't rolled out McCafe's here.  It seemed Australia's main food genre's were Italian and Asian, my two favorite!

Australian's have their own wild-west version of Robin Hood (or more likely the Dukes of Hazzard) named Ned Kelly (1870s) who is now something of a legend.  In random locations you might see interpretive paintings of Ned dressed in his homemade body armor shooting it out with the oppressive English government.  An interesting but short lived story as he was executed at age 25 and spent 3 years of his short life in prison.  But in his defense he never wanted any trouble, and with the support of several surrounding towns actually petitioned the government for permission to succeed from Victoria and become independent, as he thought this was the only chance for a peaceful resolution.  He was right.

We also took a ride on a steam paddle boat and saw the oldest operating steam boat in the world, early 1900s, which was looking very good.

Well that's enough from me.  I have attached our own version of an Aussie to American dictionary, kind of fun to look at.