Down Under Down Under

A horse named Kelly fell into a sinkhole in the 1920s and was never found – but the cave system she fell into was found and named after the ill-fated Equine. Molly and I wondered how they knew she fell into a sink hole, if they never found her, but we forgot to ask our tourguide Kaitlin. Once again, winter travel allowed us to be the only members of the tour (a Sealink day tour bus pulled out just as we started our tour). "Stalactites hold tight to the ceiling, stalagmites might someday reach the ceiling."

In addition to that ditty, our tourguide also Kaitlin told us that her mom taught her that any sort of roadkill you see, you should push it off the side so it doesn’t cause more accidents AND check to see if it had babies. If there are babies, bring them home to rehab until you can release them in the wild. That explains why she had to give up her heated waterbed to the baby kangaroos her mom brought home.

We spotted these scarlet rosellas in the trees at our lunch picnic – but still no echidna sightings in the wild!

Molly is standing under a Yacca Tree that grows 1 cm a year, which I think makes this tree about 300 years old. Any metric experts care to help me out here?

Charlie is demonstrating how to clean both shoes at once...

Leaving the big city

We started our day at Seal Bay on the south side of Kangaroo Island, home of 1000 sea lions. The winter tours are small and we had Paul, the slightly boring tourguide, all to ourselves. He took the five of us past a lady sea lion, who’s in the midst of a 3 day sleep, to the beach. We got to stand right on the beach and watch the pups play and a few macho papa sea lions struttin' their stuff.

Perhaps we have our own Brent Musberger in the family?

Charlie was pretty unimpressed and spent his time building a sandcastle that Paul, the slightly boring tourguide, accidentally stepped on. Oops. The roving reporter missed that on video.

Birds of a feather

The pelicans start lining up on the Kingscote wharf around 4:30 for the 5PM feeding. We lined up around 4:55. The birds are striking to look at and we were up close and personal. Can you see Molly’s reaction? Charlie was smarter and sat a row or two up from the action.

Mike was appointed lifeguard by our host, in case he went in while feeding the birds in the water. It’s been a while since he’s done it professionally, but the kids thought he did an impressive job (I held his Mickey Mouse watch, just in case).

Our noble pelican feeder left us with this closing poem: "A wonderful bird is the pelican, His bill will hold more than his belican. He can take in his beak Food enough for a week, But I'm darned if I see how the $#*ican."

As good parents, we forced the kids to stay up WAY past their bedtime to do the Penguin tour. Kingscote is home to one of the many Little Penguin (formerly known as Fairy Penguin) colonies on the island. About 100 penguins call the town home and at night when they come back from their day in the water, you can head out with a tourguide to see them. Penguins don’t like white light, so all the penguins were under the cover of a yellow or red torch (flashlight) and the pictures didn’t come out too well. Lots of chicks were wandering about waiting for their parents to return from fishing to regurgitate the catch (nothing unites 3 kids in laughter like that thought).

We got to see a few of the moms and dads speedily swimming in and struggling up the hillside on flippers to their burrows. The life expectancies of these penguins is 7 years – the same penguins live 20 years in captivity - in part due to feral cats on the island and the seals we saw earlier in the day. After completing our last task (another threat to life-expectancy, see below), we headed home with 2/3 struggling to stay awake for the 2km drive. Was it worth it? We’ll tell you tomorrow…

A morning in Kingscote

Kingscote is the largest town on the island, population 1700, so they say. I wonder if they count the summer tourists? The house we rented is in a neighborhood, on Emma Drive, that seems to have one permanent resident and streets full of rental houses.

The Kingscote Foodland was closed on Friday night at 8PM when we arrived and didn’t open until the next morning at 8AM. Rather than face three hungry children on Saturday morning, I went out for a run along the shoreline path. So excited to see the seals in the straight and get home quickly to bring the kids back, I missed the rock under my feet and did a fancy face plant with a skinned knee and fat lip to show for it. After getting the blood wiped off, the seals were still waiting for us! We found the community pool and are happy to note that releasing animals, especially sharks, is against the rule. Do three Conlin kids count – they aren’t related to sharks? Check out the sign!

We visited a slightly overrated honey factory/store and enjoyed our small but tasty tour of a sheep dairy. Sheep manchego…?

Interstate Travel - New South Wales to South Australia

Camera, check. Clothes, check. Itinerary, check. Passports, check. Luggage weighing less than 10kg/person so we don’t have to pay extra to check it in, let’s hope so. The maxicab (the kind that fits a family of five) arrived to take us to the Sydney Airport on Friday morning. McDonalds and Subway both had a presence in the airport food court, which felt very American.
The fact that our shoes stayed on through security and no one ever asked to see those passports that were taking up a few grams of weight or ANY other ID, did not feel American. I have to admit, it was very smooth and easy, and gave us a bit of doubt about whether it was safe enough.
Which, in turn, made me a little sad that we carry around that doubt.

At the Adelaide Airport, which is in a different time zone by 30 minutes (it took us an embarrassingly amount of time to figure that out), we skipped the baggage reclaim and found our way out.

After claiming our Cruze rental car, we headed south to catch the Spirit of Kangaroo Island. We passed through a very small town with a few restaurants and decided to risk the restaurant scene in Cape Jervis. Luckily, the one and only joint in town, had a very kind employee who volunteered to make us dinner before her shift ended at 4:30 and the cook arrived at 5. It was pretty good and a sign inside even offered “We have fresh fruit and vegetables, please ask.”

We caught the sunset over the water onboard, which we don’t get on the East Coast.

School Dayz

A few observations...

It was 70 today and Daniel wore his summer uniform. Yesterday, he had a casual teacher = substitute teacher. According to Daniel, casual teachers get treated the same as substitute teachers. He's been having a little trouble with spelling lately - do you recognise why?

This is the school yard for Molly's class. You can kinda see her in the foreground, far right. Her classroom is on the top, far left. They all open up to a veranda.

Evidence of my inability to resist a Scholastic Book order:
AFTER school yesterday we took a walk to Moverly Green, a park area close by. If we had scooters, there would be some excellent riding to be done. The following picture is what all the town bike racks look like in our area - super cute. They don't usually have kids on them and they don't usually have bikes on them either. Too hilly!

World Book Day

For World Book Day, the kids can dresses as book characters and had an assembly/parade led by Mr. Philpott, the library/p.e. teacher. Can you tell who they are?

Does the prop Molly's holding while standing next to Little Red Riding Hood (Ruby C) fill you in? It's the only thing we purchased for the event - seems we can make do with only a little.

Daniel might be harder to guess - he's not a classic yet, but there is a movie made after him. He's got his prop in hand. Molly was one of a kind (lots of generic princesses, Harry Potter Characters, and at least 3 Sherlock Holmes), but Daniel said there was one more of him: Percy Jackson.

Clothespins

A trip to Kmart yielded some beach toys - finally in season :-) - and a new supply of clothespins. The boy in Star Wars Jammies installed them for us.

Here's our guy Charlie using

Leave Well Enough Alone

Two late nights on Friday and Saturday were not solid groundwork for a Sunday of tourism. "How bad could it be?" we asked ourselves at the bus stop. Pretty bad. Thus the title of today's entry: leave well enough alone.

We headed for Circular Quay where the ferries leave Sydney and had perfect timing for hopping on the ferry to Watson's Bay. Charlie befriended a fairy on the ferry.
There was much disharmony among the Conlin troops, which cannot help but affect the mood of the commanders.

Anyway, here we are at Watson Bay, which was originally inhabited by the Cadigal Aboriginal people, but because of its lovely location on the tip of Sydney Harbor, the Europeans settled it in the late 1700s. Our guidebook would describe it as having a yummy fish and chips takeaway ($1.20 for tomato sauce=ketchup), gorgeous view tainted a bit by large wire fences (it's unfortunately a popular place for many reasons), and the coolest piece of playground equipment we've ever encountered. Not bad for having a low and sometimes high hum of arguing going on in the background, but one does wonder whether the day would have been better spent otherwise.

Doyle's Fish and Chips, right off the boat.

Sydney and the Coat Hanger bridge in the back ground.

More or less how Charlie and we felt all day:


Yep, it goes around and up and down crazy fast!

We tried our tropical fruit tonight for dinner - longans and passion fruit - finished reading the Australian Classic The Magic Pudding (thankfully, since I never could get the hang of singing the frequently interspersed songs, although there are some mighty funny parts) and had an early bedtime.



Daniel got to stay up until a whopping 7:45 tonight to watch another episode of the Six Million Dollar Man, which our local library has on DVD. For your information, they were not available at all on DVD in the States until last year and only then for the entire series in a set for $239 (I knew this, of course, when they were released). I spent many Sunday nights watching the Six Million Dollar Man and wishing to be Jaime Summers. This version we have of Season 2 offers Dutch subtitles as an option. Daniel is loving this 1970s drama. Personally, I am wishing I had left well enough alone in my childhood memories.

Good night, from the grumpy tourguide.

The Australian Museum

We drove to downtown Sydney today, despite the kids requesting the bus (they've made collecting used tickets a hobby and wanted more - funny what lack of toys will drive them to) and followed the signs in the car park for "Casual Parking". We took an underground tunnel with an under-construction moving walkway from the parking lot to where we were headed.
We were NOT headed to Woolloomooloo, but we like how many "o"s are in one word. We're divided over whether that is more fun that Mississippi to spell.


We've arrived at the Australian Museum and went through the following exhibits:
"Surviving Australia"


"Birds of Paradise"

"Dinosaurs"

"Skeletons" and

"Discovery Center" exhibits.

We learnt (seriously), among other things, about sea worms that are 2 meters long (it might not just be sand moving under your feet); giant wombats that used to roam the earth; 20/25 of the most venomous snakes in the world who call Australia home; how you will feel and what steps to take if you're bitten by a shark, red back spider or one of the snakes previously mentioned; and how to shake your tail feathers.

Tonight we had another delicious dinner at Hodaka and Yokimi's house. Hodaka was a graduate student at Cornell, when Mike first started teaching there. The chair of the economics department was there too and entertained 3 Conlin kids with card tricks. We lasted until about 9:30, when Charlie lead us out in dramatic fashion, 2 hours after his bedtime.