Big. Really big!

The first leg of our trip home tomorrow is a two-hour flight from Cairns to Brisbane. Two hours in the air and we won't even make it out of Queensland!

I think most Americans think of Australia as an over-sized island at the bottom of the world, but have no idea how big it really is.

It's big! We've been living in "Far North Queensland" -- the pointy bit in the upper right of Australia. Far North Queensland is about as big as New England, but has a population of just 250,000 people-- much less than the Springfield Metropolitan Area. Or, if you've travelled out West, you can think of Far North Queensland as being kind of like Wyoming-- it's about the same size, but has half as many people.

We're already thinking we'll come back in a few years. We might spend a couple of months seeing some other bits of Australia; my uncle lived in Western Australia (which is even bigger and emptier than Queensland) and knows some fantastic spots over on that coast. And I think I'll have to drag the family around Melbourne WAY down in the other corner of the country, to see where I spent the first five years of my life.

xmas season

Michele: It still doesn't feel like Christmas here even though there are decorations up, the kids exchanged x-mas cards with their friends, Santa-featured ads are on TV and we hear carols here and there. Something about sleigh bells jingling doesn't match with the hot humid rainforest background. I find it startling how many cards and decorations in Australia feature snowmen, snow scenes and Santa in a big parka. Not that I want to see Santa in a budgy smuggler -- shorts would work fine. Notes for Americans: Budgies = parakeets and a Budgy smuggler is Aussie for a speedo but a speedo in Aussie is a speedometer. On the road to Cairns yesterday we saw a sign that said "speedo check". Both Gavin and Will failed the speedo check.

Anyways, as you can imagine Christmas here involves pool parties and BBQ rather than roaring fires and ham. I thought that the combination of watermelon and five-corner fruit looked Christmasy. The five-corner fruit are from Uncle Larry's amazing garden. Delicious.

Another reason it doesn't yet feel like Christmas is that we spent the past week purging, cleaning, packing, saying good-bye and shutting down the house. The kids in Robin and Will's classes gave them wonderful goodbyes with cards and gifts. Friends and family found homes for a lot of our household items that we bought to supplement the furnished house. The lovely couch got sold to the second hand shop. It has been an exhausting week. The next few days in Cairns will be refreshingly relaxing.

upside down world

Michele: Tonight is a full moon. Watching the moon rise over the sea and Dunk Island is a really nice exclamation point to our last days in Mission Beach. When we first arrived a couple things took me a long time to get used too. One was that the north side of the house is the sunny side. The south wind brings cool air from Antartica but these days are getting lots of hot northeast winds. Something I really didn't expect down under is the upside down moon.

Jim Frazier pointed out to me that down under the moon looks to have a rabbit and not a man. This image from the web has far more detail than you can see in the sky so to see the rabbit you will need to unfocus your eyes a bit -- a couple Carlton Draughts can facilitate this. All the images on the web show the moon from a different perspective than shown here - they are probably from the northern hemisphere. I had to rotate the image 90˚ counter clockwise to get it to look like what I see outside right now.

The difference between the rabbit and the man is all about point of view. Over the past 5 months I've really enjoyed learning about, understanding and appreciating the Australian point of view on life, cultures, world politics, health care and even the moon.

MBSS hosts the shire's best school grounds!

Michele: These last few days in Mission Beach it has been on my agenda to take photos of the school that Robin and Will attend. I need to document the grounds because otherwise you would not believe me. Image a school grounds with clustered plantings between walkways, The plantings use bromeliad as ground cover and include vanilla orchids climbing up the palms, mauve ginger flowers, huge purple orchids and fern epiphytes the size of four year 2 students (see photo of the door to Will's year 2 classroom). You just wouldn't take this for a primary school!

As I was taken photos with the kids after school today I came across Mr. Sheppard, the school gardener. I had a wonderful chat with him about the beauty of the school, the various plants and his job. He doesn't have to produce such lovely grounds, he just loves gardening. When I asked, he confessed that his garden has every year won best school grounds in the whole shire (shire = county) -- except for one year he didn't win when they applied chlorine to the school walls. I suspect it was the crew from Tully Primary that did that. ;-)

This photo shows Mr. Sheppard with one of the vanilla orchids. He is one of the people that make Mission Beach an incredibly special place.

Australian Good Ideas #7: meat pies and lamb snags

Michele: Meat pie is just what it sounds like - a pie filled with meat (mostly beef as far as I can tell) and sauce. Every town has at least one bakery that sells these pies. Some bakeries offer fancy varieties with vegetables like peas or onions. The one in the photo is a frozen meat pie heated in the microwave for my lunch... yum. You are supposed to eat meat pie with tomato (to - mah' to) sauce but I like mine naked.

One of our favorite dinners is lamb snag (sausage). The butcher sells them with rosemary seasoning and they are really yummy and inexpensive. We have thoroughly taken advantage of the opportunity to eat Australia lamb while we've been here. It is awesome. Definitely something we will miss back in the US.

I realize that quite of few of my vegetarian friends my be reading this and not convinced. If you are the type of vegetarian you can wiggle your boundaries around a bit I highly recommend you try a little bit of lamb snag and meat pie when you are in Australia.

Dangerous Roads

Michele: Last week a Cassowary was struck by a car and killed on the road in Wongaling Beach (the next town). Cars and dogs are the leading dangers for the less than 3000 or so Cassowaries left in far north Queensland. We feel very lucky to have seen 4 Cassowaries since we've been here and hope that they will be around for a long time.

Signs are posted along the road to remind motorists to slow down as they pass through the rainforest. Some signage, such as "Cassowaries utilize this area" seem a little wordy to my ear. The sign pictured here gets to the point with the graphics even if the text is a little passive-aggressive. There is another passive-aggressive one that says "Are you Speeding?". Why don't they just make it an imperative "slow down". When I first saw these signs I hadn't yet seen a Cassowary and thought that the scale of the bird was a little off in the graphics. It is not! The Cassowaries are large and could seriously damage a car. Never the less, few people drive at the posted speeds.

We've seen a fair bit of road kill here but the most unusual that I've seen was a wild pig this morning in Wongaling. It was huge and I'm sure that whoever hit it has some body damage to their vehicle. Most of the road kill are Wallabies. Wallabies fill the same ecological niche as deer back in North America. They graze on grass in herds, inspire paintings, invade vegetable gardens, take over some communities and they are just as dumb. You know that phrase 'like a deer in the headlights'? Well it works for Wallabies too. One evening I came down a hill towards a Wallaby, slowing down the whole way and the critter just stared at me. Just before I came to a complete stop 10 meters from the marsupial did it realize that it should probably hop away.

An Ausmerican Thanksgiving flaws and all

Michele: Thanksgiving was just another day in Australia so we tried to make it special. No turkey dinner here, no cranberry sauce or apple pie. It is hot and humid these days so even the thought of cooking such a meal is unappealing. But we did have a turkey - just not the poultry kind.

It turns out that if you make your own Pavlova you can make it into a shapes other than the circles available at the supermarket. So with the help of a recipe from Mariel, I set out to make a Turkey shaped Pav. It wasn't too hard. Robin drew a turkey shape on paper and then I put the paper on top of some aluminum foil with something soft underneath and traced the shape with a blunt knife. This made a groove in the aluminum foil in the shape of a turkey that I could use as a guide for when I arranged the meringe. For something soft under the aluminum foil I used Robin's homework book - more on that in a bit.

When the Pav was done baking and cooling the kids and I had great fun decorating it to look like a Turkey with food coloring, lollies and strawberries. It was great and tasted just like the ones from Woolies. I took a picture of the awesome turkey-shaped Pavlova but unfortunately, Will was playing with the camera later last night and deleted that photo. He also put the camera into some weird mode that will probably take me months to get out of. Anyways, today I took this photo above of the left-overs. It isn't the same....

Well that wasn't the only thing that went wrong last night with the Pav. Remember I said that I used Robin's homework book as something soft to transfer the turkey shape to the aluminum foil? Well, I forgot to take the book out from under the foil before I baked the Pav - I cooked her homework book. Yes, the Pav had an interesting burnt paper smell as it cooked but since I hadn't made Pav before I didn't recognize this as amiss. You've seen a cookbook but have you seen a cooked book?

Of course Robin's teacher thought this was great fun and told the other teachers and even had Robin tell the story to the whole class for show and tell. There goes any credibility I had built up after I visited school a few weeks ago to talk to Robin's class about planetary geology.