We are traveling up the east coast of Australia via Greyhound. All the cities are totally spread out so it takes quite a bit of time to get from one place to another. We stopped in Port Macquire for awhile and our host showed us around town and took us out dancing with all the "schoolies" (high school graduates who talk a week to a month after school to travel, get drunk and into trouble). We then went to Byron Bay which is a wonderfully bohemian town. Everyone walks around bare foot and bare chested. The beach front parking lot is filled with hippie camper vans. The beach is filled with surfers, drum circles and sun bathers. Angelene swan in the ocean for the first time in her life here, it was great! Our hostel was just a hop from the beach and had a beachie resort type feel, definatly the best in Australia so far. We headed for surfers paradise next. It was packed with schoolies, thankfully we were only staying for one day! We did a bit of shopping here and got some meds for Angelene's cold. We are now in Noosa Heads, a small resort town. We went swimming again last night. We may head to the national park today or just spend a lazy day on the beach, who knows!
We booked some exciting trips so we will have lots of exciting news when we return.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
***More photos on flickr
well we made it to australia. it was a 14.5 hour flight from LA. We both got swollen ankles from the flight, and it didn't go away for at least a day. We are staying in Sydney, near downtown. there's not a ton to do here, but it is nice. we're getting back into the groove of walking around ALL day. we went to the zoo yesterday and saw an Orangutan pee into a plastic bottle and then drink it. it has been overcast here, so we are not sunburnt yet. we haven't hit the beach yet because it has been a little too chilly. we are heading north tomorrow on the greyhound. we bought a hop-on hop-off ticket that will take us all the way up to cairns. the beer here seems to be far superior to the european beer that we have gotten accustomed to. everyone seems pretty nice here too. we will try to post some pictures in a day or 2.
Cheers!
We made it back to the USA will all of our baggage. We spent 2 days in Cambridge with our Irish friends Cathal and Eimer, and Eimer's boyfriend Lee. We had a very good time. We went punting on the river, which is boating but where the boat is propelled by a person who uses a long pole to push along the bottom of the river. We got the lazy mans' tour though, and had someone else do the punting for us. It was cold and wet there, as it was in England. Then we went to Dublin for about 2 days. It was cold there, but not wet. We walked around a lot, and went to the sites that we missed the first time around. We did a fair amount of shopping; we got all our last minute gifts taken care of. Angelene said that we had to spend the rest of our Euros so we wouldn't have to be bothered by carrying them around, and we pretty much succeeded at that. Now we are in Chicago. The weather is beautiful, 51F and sunny. I couldn't believe that i would ever think 51F was beautiful, but it was... until the sun dissapeared. We went to the post office and to Chipotle for lunch. We leave for Aussieland tomorrow. We fly to LA, then it is a 14.5 hour flight to Sydney, ouch!! I'm sure it will be worth it. We have also replenished our supply of reading materials, so that should help as well. That is all.
Who knew that a skill such as tree climbing would ever come in handy?! We have been harvesting olives for about a week now and it still seems like there is so much more to do. It has been a dry year so the olives are not as plentiful as they could have been but what is there takes time and work to extract from the trees. We talked about Ryan trying to train monkeys to pick the olives for us, it seems much more natural for them to be hanging from the flimsy branches of an olive tree then for a clumsy human to be. We use a few methods for removing the olives. One is to whack the tree with a long stick. This method is effective but also brakes a lot of branches off the tree and ends up pelting the other workers with hard, little olives. Another method, my favorite, is using a small hand-held rake and combing each branch. This is the cleanest method but is hard for the out-of-reach branches. The last is to prune the branches off the tree with a small saw and use a combination of the first two methods for removing the olives from these trimmed branches. You may wonder if there is an alternative to human labor, other then monkeys, to getting this job done. There is...a machine was invented for doing this work but has been know to harm the tree. Also, Armenian workers have helped in the past and we are told they are much more productive then the current American worker.
We are leaving Greece on Friday and start a 10 day journey to Australia via London, Dublin and Chicago. We are excited for the beach and the sun but sad to leave this wonderful little village of Antirrio. Two nights ago Dimitris took us to the local fish cafe and ate octopus, calamari, anchovies, sardenes (the last two are surprisingly good here), beet salad and chacolate cake for desert. We washed everything down with couple of small bottles of Ouzo. All this only set us back 41 Euro! Everything was very fresh and Dimitris said the owner of the cafe is a grilling genious, we agree. Tonight, we will grill in the fireplace the two meters of sauges Yannis purchased and watch the Champions Futball League on television.
