Country mice enjoy the BIG city

Michele: We had an awesome time in Townsville towards the end of the school term break. The hotel right on the strand by the rock pool just had one room left for two nights - karma. Now most folks don't think of Townsville as a BIG city. With a population of about 160,000 it is smaller than Madison, Wisconsin, where Gavin and I lived for 3 years. We never felt that Madison was a BIG city. Certainly not a city worth capitalizing the adjective BIG. But after several months of living in in Mission Beach, population 3,000 we were ready for a visit to a town that has the marvels of traffic lights. We traveled 230 km to Townsville passing through a whomping total of 4 traffic lights between our house and the edge of downtown Townsville -- and the whole way was on 2 lane road, not a freeway.

We had a busy couple days. Townsville is a little farther from Mission Beach than Cairns but we enjoy that Townsville isn't so packed with tourists. Also Townsville is in the dry tropics and has very different flora than Mission Beach and Cairns, which are in the wet tropics.

Robin: We finally found a Japanese restaurant and the food was great. And for dessert we had a banana flambe! A banana flambe is bananas that they light on fire. And we had it with ice cream. It was very good.

We went to the Museum of Tropical Queensland and my favourite part about it was a room full of interactive science things. This picture was taken there. I liked the part where you had to trace a star while looking in a mirror that was reflecting the star and your finger. It was HARD. I also liked the IMAX movie next door. We saw Under the Sea but it made me a little dizzy. At some points the fish would go jerk and eat something and that made me jump.

On the last night after we went to the Greek restaurant, the sky was filled with fruit bats. And there was one in a tree and it climbed into where the light was shining on it and we could see it and it was cool. It looked just like Stella Luna, who is a bat character in a book that I like. We walked along the strand and watched bats all the way to an ice cream place. At that ice cream place they smooshed up the ice cream that you chose along with the toppings that you chose on a really really cold table. I had mango ice cream with M&M that had peanuts in them. And the M&Ms instead of leaving them whole in the ice cream, they squished them. While we were eating our ice cream outside, we saw some bush stone curlews. One of them even walked into where the street light was shining so you could see it real well.