Christmas in Australia 2003

Saturday morning, we headed back south towards Brisbane to meet up with the Hartley side of the family in Redcliffe at Sutton's Beach. I took a few photos of some birds - ibis, to be specific. This one is looking toward the parking lot (car park)

I spent most of the day making friends with Maree (three and a half) and Justin (19 months). We ran around on the grass and later, when there was some shade on the sand, we went and played on the sand.

Megan's family left the beach before the rest of us, and when we got back to the house, Justin squealed when he saw me. Megan said, "I think you've been recognized." Then Maree came running to give me a hug, and I had two new friends.

Sunday morning was church, and like church at home, I met a bazillion people and we had goodies and coffee and punch after the service. We went to a flea market after church where I found another Michael Crichton book for $3, so I will be reading that sometime in the next three weeks while I'm in Goroka.

In the afternoon, seven of us went Christmas shopping. The mall's posted closing time was 6p, but they shooed us out of Big W (all the signs have the Wal-Mart graphics, so I assume they're the same store) at 5p. It was kind of funny. I rode with Wayne and Megan and they took me to Point Cartwright. I only have pictures from the air, but it gives you an idea:

You can sort of see the car park (parking lot) on the left of the picture, just right of the tall building, then we walked up the path to the other side of the lighthouse and looked off in the general direction of the lighthouse shadow, if that makes sense.

That evening, sitting around the table, someone had a small Rubik's cube - only four blocks to a side instead of nine. I got it all messed up and not fixable, so decided to cheat by popping out one of the squares. The four-block cubes are made differently from the nine-block cubes and it fell apart. I kept Marty entertained while I tried to put it back together, but eventually had to get Wayne to put the last piece in because I wasn't strong enough to do it.

On Monday, Robin (Ron and Cherryl's first son) and Michelle (his wife) went to visit a friend who also keeps snakes (Robin is a big reptile fan). They offered to take along anyone who was interested, so Ron, Marty, Wayne, and I went. Wayne and Marty weren't too interested in holding snakes, but they told me they weren't poisonous, so I held two (one picture came to Dad in a print).

Robin's shirt says Dad: someone who hopes his sons will turn out just like him, and who is afraid his daughters will meet someone who did. You can see a bit of the refraction on the snake's scales that make it look rainbow-colored (coloured). Apparently this is where the Aboriginal thing about the rainbow snake came from. It was really cool to see.

In the afternoon, Wayne and I went Christmas shopping again and then for a walk around Maroochydore. It was fun walking with Wayne because we walk about the same (fast) speed, and apparently our stride is the same length proportionally, because when we're in step his head doesn't seem to be bobbing up and down. The bad part about walking the same (fast) speed is that when he got ahead of me I couldn't catch up without running.

I was not trying to catch up, however, when I stepped half on and half off the footpath (sidewalk), lost my balance, and went tumbling down. I scraped my knee well and good and lots worse than the time I fell down when I was walking with Ryan. I thought there was a lesson there for me that I shouldn't walk alone with boys, but since I didn't fall down again any other time I was walking with Wayne, maybe that's not quite the case.

Of course, being 28, one feels embarassed when one falls down, and Wayne said he had strong enough shoulders for me to blame it on him. So when we got back to the house, I told everyone that he pushed me. It got a good laugh and a few "he's like that, isn't he?"s out of the grown ups. A few days later, though, Maree (who came every morning to ask how my knee was going) said, "Uncle Wayne pushed you, didn't he?" and I had to set the record straight because I couldn't let her grow up thinking Uncle Wayne was a mean guy. So, I told her that he just couldn't catch me in time when I fell, and she repeated that again to me the next day, so I know she got the story right. It's amazing to see the workings of a 3-year-old mind.

Monday evening, I helped Wayne, Marty, and Ron straighten out the Christmas lights and get as many consecutive sections of lights working on each string as possible (which involved figuring out how many lights were in a section and which ones were bad), and then we got them strung up. It was fun, and I felt involved and useful.

Tuesday was a trip to the optometrist, where we decided to try another type of lens and lessen the prescription for my right lens. Because I'm not Australian, I'm not on the medical insurance, so he just charged me the pensioner's (retiree's) rate for the exam, which I thought was very nice of him.

In the afternoon, I went shopping with Cherryl, Wayne, and Megan. We were gone for five hours, and too late for the fish and chips shops by the time we were done, so we got pizza for dinner. While we were at a craft store, I was looking through pattern books and found a wedding dress pattern that had all the features I wanted (in one pattern! I was amazed), so I wrote down the pattern number in case I should ever have need of a wedding dress.

Wednesday was Christmas Eve. We went to the Christmas Eve service and I sang an Australian Christmas carol. I didn't know it, so I didn't sing the first verse and Pauline, who was sitting next to me, hit me on the arm and said, "Sing!" So I sang! :)

After church was the big family gathering at Grandma Neideck's. She has eight children, many of whom have children and grandchildren, and their family tradition is to gather on Christmas Eve and have Santa Claus come and distribute presents to everyone (mainly Grandma Neideck's gifts to the family). I even got one! As the evening went on, I had Maree and the twins, Hunter and Connor (who were born the same day as Maree), around me with my present and their presents on my lap, with all of them wanting me to open something or share something or what have you. It was great. I sent a print copy of that to Dad.

I don't have a digital picture of the boys, but here is a picture of Maree and Connor. They're identical twins, so you get the idea. Hunter is a bit smaller than Connor, even though he's older, and he has shorter hair at the moment.

Thursday, of course, was Christmas. We had the Hartley family Christmas with everyone except Robin and Michelle's two daughters, who were visiting their dad. That means it was Ron, Cherryl, Robin, Michelle, Hunter, Connor, Wayne, Glen (son number three), Megan, Marty, Maree, Justin, Pauline, Tiffany, and Grandma Neideck coming and going. Mostly there were print pictures of that.

Christmas was a warm day. Dad called around lunchtime from wintery Phoenix. Apparently the phone number hadn't gotten from me to him or was lost on a broken hard drive somewhere or something, so Barb had to look the number up on the internet, and then they had to figure out how to dial Australia with the right number of 1s and 0s in the right places, but they got through! And I was able to talk to all of the family that was there in Phoenix, and it was very nice.

Tiffany got the Barbie "Swan Lake" video from Wayne, so we had to watch that in the afternoon. After it was over, Wayne asked if we'd like to go see some black swans at a park nearby, so he, Tiffany, Maree, and I went to the park. I have an .mpg of that that I will bring when I come home on leave.

Here is my favorite picture of the swans that Wayne took. There were two black swans and three signets (baby swans) in all. My pictures did not turn out so well.

After we looked at the swans a bit, Tiffany and Maree had to get in some quality time on the playground and the swings. In this picture, Tiffany is giving her Swan Lake Barbie (also a Christmas gift) a turn on the swing.

On the way home, Maree was too tired to walk all the way, so she got a piggyback ride from Wayne that quickly turned into on the shoulders because she kept slipping off his back, but the picture of the piggyback turned out better than the shoulders picture, so here it is.

Tiffany also picked a flower for me on the way home, which I stuck in my hair. Later, Ron suggested a picture with the Santa sign, and said to be sure to tell Dad that Santa did indeed stop there. :)

On Friday, we went to Mary Cairncross Park, in what apparently is called the hinterlands, but did not seem very "hinter" to me, when compared with, say, 12000ft Mt. Humphreys. But everything is relative. There is a bit of a rainforest preserve there. This picture shows the type of trees they had at the preserve.

They also have what are called strangler figs, which grow around another tree until that tree suffocates and dies, and then it rots away leaving the trunk hollow. This is a picture of the biggest one of these in the park. You can see the daylight on the other side.

After we left the park, we went to a town called Montville for lunch, where I had a most excellent chicken burger. It was a bit like Sedona, with lots of arts and crafts shops, including a wood shop that smelled really great.

Friday night, we went over to Uncle Colin and Auntie Heather's house (Cherryl's sister) for some games. Uncle Colin is apparently a collector, and had some nice old cars and motorcycles, and lots of antique farm equipment, a lot of which came from America. It was neat to see all of that. They have a good view from their house and a nice verandah, so we spent quite a long time on the verandah talking. There were probably about 10 people there, so it was a good group.

Saturday it rained quite a bit and Wayne and I spent a lot of time inside playing with the kids. In the evening, Megan, Marty, Wayne and I went out to the movies to see "Scary Movie 3." It was silly, but funny.

SUNDAY: We ditched morning church for some reason that is no longer clear to me, but agreed that we'd go to the youth service in the evening. I thought that would be a good "something else" to experience anyway, since morning church was rather like many other morning churches, and I'd done that the week before.

So, Wayne and I went to the Forest Glen Deer Sanctuary (which may not be the actual name) and waited for it to stop raining so we could go see the animals. Of course, the biggest thing about this day was that I got to HOLD A KOALA named Millie! See, here's proof:

It rained quite a lot when we got there, but the koala enclosure was covered, so that was fine. The rain let up a bit after the koala adventure. We also saw deer, kangaroos, a wombat, emus, geese, and chickens, all of which were water-logged. The rain stayed away just long enough for us to see everything we wanted to see.

We had lunch at Hungry Jack's, which I kept wanting to call Happy Jack's (why?), which is the same as Burger King. It even says "copyright Burger King corporation" on the stuff, yet it's not Burger King. Go figure. Then Wayne offered to let me email from his house. That also gave me the opportunity to see his hundreds of trophies/medals/prizes for his competition shooting, and see his guns. Competition guns don't look a lot like I would think a gun would look. They still shoot bullets, though, and I had a lesson on making sure that guns are empty when they're being passed around.

He also had a regular revolver with a bulge in the barrel (I think that's what he called it). I asked what that was, and found myself staring down the barrel of an empty revolver, which was a little bit of an odd sensation, even though it was obviously empty. And, I could see the bulge, which was cool.

In the evening, Wayne and I went to the youth service with Ron and Cherryl and it was good that the kids are involved, but they need help with the mixing. The music was much too loud for the voice level, so there was no real melody to sing along with. But it was a nice service and because it was a small service, we all stood in a semi-circle for communion, which I thought was nice.

The entrance is on the right, with the parking lot (car park) on the far right. The straight side of the building is the front of the sanctuary, with windows overlooking the view. It was nice.

And, would you believe it, Steve and Terri Irwin were there, live and in person! They said that that Monday they broke their own record, with over 7,000 people entering the zoo. It was crowded, but not too terribly crowded except in the snake house, which was inside and sort of stuffy and had so many people around the snakes that we couldn't see anything and I was freaking out. Just a little.

We did see another snake display, though. Wayne got a cool shot of me looking at the snake, and it gives you an idea how big this particular python is. You can see Wayne's reflection in the window, too, which I think is neat.

Here is me petting a kangaroo. At the deer sanctuary, they were all behind fences, but there was a big enclosure where you could walk around with them at the zoo.

And this is a really great shot that Wayne got over the tops of everyone's heads of Steve Irwin with the albino (there's another name for it - lus-something) crocodile. We weren't going to go see that show, then went over late, and could only see one cage, and that's the cage that he jumped into last, so we got to see it pretty well, though it was crowded.

Monday night, we went to dinner at Sizzler. Maree was pretty hyper, and kept going back and forth between me holding her and Wayne holding her. Megan was busy with Justin, so I helped Maree get her plate and that was a very nice thing to be able to do.

Megan's family left Tuesday morning, and Wayne and I went to the early showing of "Lord of the Rings." I'm glad I got to see it on the big screen.

In the afternoon, Wayne and I went to Underwater World and got in for free because one of his aunts is friends with someone who works there. Apparently it's not related to the Underwater World on Guam, but it was still marine-themed. They had seals and otters, too, which was good to see.

Tuesday night was dinner at the house with 12 people - Ron, Cherryl, Robin, Michelle, Georgia (the younger of their daughters), the twins, Wayne, Glen, Pauline, Tiffany, and me. I realized on Tuesday that, in my opinion, being alone is for the birds and is not how God intended things to be.

Wednesday was New Year's Eve. Wayne and I went down in the early morning to his Uncle Lester's flight school, and Uncle Lester took us up in a little plane, along with a Japanese student who was staying with Wayne's aunt (who had the friend at Underwater World).

Under the green awning right about .. (..here..) is where the table was that we sat at for all our meals except breakfast. The window to the room I slept in is just above the green awning.

After the flight, Wayne and I took Pauline and Tiffany out to lunch at Hungry Jack's (including ice cream!), and then to see the Looney Tunes movie. New Year's Eve, Wayne and I went to Mooloolaba (mah-loo-la-bah) beach with the same aunt and Japanese student to see the 9p fireworks show. We had a nice spot on the beach and I made a sand turtle while we waited for the show to start.

In my journal, I wrote, "Going back to PNG is only bad because I know it will be lonely there. I hate that. BUT, God knows what He's doing - I got to be in Australia tonight."

Thursday, New Year's Day, was a lazy morning. I cleaned up deleted emails and Wayne stayed home in the morning putting his pictures on CD for me, which is how some of these pictures I've sent have gotten to you. In the evening, we went for a walk on Maroochydore beach because it seemed like I ought to walk on the beach at least once when I was only three blocks away from it. Wayne got a few pictures of the beach, but the camera battery died before we could transfer them to my computer, so thoes will have to come another time.

Friday was time to leave. Wayne took me to the airport and Grandma Neideck lent us her car with air conditioning (hooray!) to get there. We looked through the shops a bit and finished the game of War that Miriam and I had started while waiting for our Brisbane flight, and then it was time to go.

Alix and Georgia belong to Robin (son #1) and Michelle, from Michelle's first marriage. The twins are theirs together. Everyone else I think I explained before.

And this is from the last full day in Maroochydore, when we finally went for a walk on the beach. I didn't have this before because the camera battery died. Did I tell you that already? Very possibly.

I have lots more pictures, as I said, so if you want to see more views of anything, let me know and I'll send those...I hope you have enjoyed reliving my Christmas/New Year's holidays with me! I've enjoyed writing it down.