Australia

Clif had a conference in Brisbane for the humane society so I tagged along. We spent a few days in Sydney before the conference. It was so nice to be in a real city again! It was the first time that either of us had been out of the Samoan islands since we moved to American Samoa. I know, life on a tropical island can't be that bad, it's just that the lack of amenities and variety and shopping and fresh fruits (other than bananas and pineapples) and clean sidewalks and... yeah, it gets to you sometimes.

We stayed in a cool old building in the Rocks, with lots of quirks and a fun rooftop garden; we went to see an opera at the Opera House; and mostly, we wandered around the city taking it all in.

We had a couple days to kill and decided that it would be fun to see a bit of Australia outside of the major cities. Instead of flying to Brisbane, we canceled our tickets and drove up the coast. It was beautiful.

Our first stop was Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park where we saw a kangaroo and 2 wallabies! The wallabies are crouched together to the left of the kangaroo.

We went to a Koala Hospital in Port MacQuarie.
At Dorrigo National Park, I was chased by a hungry bird. It really wanted the sandwich I was eating. Dorrigo is a beautiful rainforest with a canopy walkway and lots of birds. I even saw a pademelon.
We stopped in Coff's Harbor hoping to see the thousands of muttonbirds at Muttonbird Island. Unfortunately we had just missed them (damn those migration patterns), but we did see trees full of these colorful parrots.

Then we hit the Gold Coast. It was beautiful! Miles and miles of white sandy beaches.

Most of our time in Brisbane was spent at the conference so we don't have many pictures, but I really enjoyed what I was able to see of the city.

just FYI

Everett would, "much rather be a fashion model than a yoga instructor."

I have no idea what brought that on, but he is absolutely certain of it.

crabby

Savai'i

Thanks to an invite from a colleague, Clif and I spent a weekend in independent Samoa. We went to a concert and were able to see some of Savai'i. It is so different than Tutuila: less development, more land, fewer people... It was beautiful! We definitely need to return with the kids.

We stayed at Stevenson's at Manase right on this gorgeous beach. The water here is so refreshing. There is cold fresh water runoff all along the beach so the top layer of the water is nice and cool, but the saltwater underneath is a balmy 84 degrees. So nice!

Although I don't have pictures of it, I think the true highlight of the trip was staying out late with new friends, drinking and singing whatever we could remember of old songs -with our own accompanist!

more plumeria pictures

I'm getting caught up so I can post Australia pictures!

So our pink plumerias finally bloomed. We have 5- and 6-petal varieties, although we don't know their technical names because they were taken from cuttings. They are a gorgeous color, but not nearly as fragrant as the white and yellow version.

This next one is really cool; it fades from a vibrant pink to white on each petal. The colors didn't come out exactly right in the picture, but it's really amazing.

The colors are much more vibrant the first day these bloom. Then they start to fade. It's really interesting. We had a rose bush that did the same thing when we lived in Spokane. It was kind of fun to see a red rose next to a peach rose on the same stem.

a boy and his camera

Everett has always been fascinated by photography. When he was four we let him use our old 35mm point and shoot when we would spend weekends in Yellowstone. I loved seeing his perspective of things. One of my favorites is a picture he took of a field of grass. He was just as tall as the grass and taking the picture from that height completely changed the look of the field.

Over the past couple months, he's been carrying around our old digital camera nonstop. Simon has gotten so sick of living with his own personal paparazzi, that he won't let Everett take pictures of him anymore. So Everett's newest thing are self-portraits. I really like some of them.

Christmas break hike

Ever since we moved to our house on the beach, we've been a lot less gung-ho about going to other beaches. It's just so easy to go to the one we live by and we've been to so much of the island that the allure of unexplored places doesn't really call to us anymore. So after a few days of relaxing at home and for the first time in months, we went to a different beach.

We hiked to Fagatele Bay. It's always beautiful there and usually too rough to snorkel. Luckily for us it was nice and calm; unluckily for us, everyone knew it was usually rough so no one brought snorkel gear. Oh well, it was still a beautiful place to spend the afternoon.