some pretty exciting stuff has been happening down under in the last few weeks, so sit back, get a drink and enjoy...

our trip down highway one (the ONLY highway) continued with a few days in noosa on the gold coast... your basic resort town filled with overpriced crap food, super busy beaches, and fancy holiday homes that only old people and the rich can live in... it was lovely though, and my tan increased about 3 fold... not as dark as hugh, i am at a slightly golden browny, pink color... not tan, but darker than my usual pasty color.

after noosa we drove to brisbane to hang with ian withers, a friend from uni, who is working as an architect in the city. continuing with the "hugh and kristin are losers" tour of the east coast, our first stop was the free internet at the library... on the drive we did stop at "aussie world" which was about the saddest excuse for an amusement park that i have ever seen... but we walked for a bit, and debated buying rude beer coozies... woohoo.

ian thwarted our boringness by taking us to north stradbroke island, off the coast, for the weekend where we had more beach time, hiking time, and frisbee time... when we got back to town we finally gave buttercup the TLC that she deserved and got her roadworthy test (only 1000kms after we were suppose to... but as she is a 1985 beast of a car, she handled those kms with grace and only slight sputtering.) attempting to be a 'man,' hugh even fixed the rust on the car (the only thing holding us back from the certificate) by, well, covering it up with spray paint and a bit of surface putty. the guy at the garage, who was VERY ready for his easter holiday, just shrugged, figured that we were cheap asses, and weren't going to do anything more, and gave us the certification... score one for the good guys!

we finally left brisbane after a week of lolling about, and drove down to byron bay/surfers paradise/nimbin... up to this point we have really not had any experience with traffic. even in brissy (a 'city') we were never in bumper to bumper traffice, but there was a huge blues and roots festival which caused everyone in a 500km radius to converge upon this one area, and we couldn't get a place to stay (damn planning ahead) and couldn't even find a place to park in the entire town... this would have been a lovely place to enjoy the sun and the waves, but we just kind of did a bit of drive by touristing, and saw the famous light house and then hit the road... alas, i guess next time...

instead of having chocolate bunnies and cadbury's cream eggs on easter we decide that we would spend one God's sacred days drinking wine at the vineyards of hunter valley (just northwest of sydney)... we went to a couple tastings (one at a place called blueberry hill! yeah wash U) and picked up some fabulous chardonney, and some great homemade cheese...

so hugh has been driving buttercup the WHOLE TIME... this has been pretty good for me... i just sit in the passenger seat and fiddle with the radio... i locate cheesy music which we sing along with (out of tune, of course) and if there is ever more than one road to travel on, i read the map just well enough to not get us too lost...

however, a good thing never lasts and i had to drive myself to canberra the other day to get to the ultimate tournament (austrailian nationals!) SOooo... i had my 3rd left side of the road driving experience, 1st city driving down under, and 1st time in the car alone for more than 10 mintues experience as i left the bustling metropolis of sydney... i found my way out of the city centre rather easily, but when i hit the eight million sydney suburbs i kind of got distracted by the fact that i was desparately low on gas and tried to read my map, drive, and find a petrol station that wasn't charging a over a dollar per liter on the holiday weekend all at the same time... as can be expected i got lost for a good thirty minutes... i finally made it out of town and to canberra, the countries capitol, relatively unscathed...

for the past four days i have been playing pretty hardcore ultimate with the best girls from new zealand (well the ones who had enough money and time to fly to OZ to play in the australian nationals) and it was a wonderful time... we kicked some major ass, and know you can all say that you know a national champion. yep... we won the whole tournament; we went undefeated against all of the aussie teams that we played, and i will come back to the states with a lovely (plastic) gold medal... One of the teams gave me an award (yeah, it might have been the "you're an ok player too bad that you are 5'4" on a team of tall girls, you may have endurance, but you can't sprint for shit, and to bad you dropped that disc that time..." award, but its the thought that counts. oh, and i might have exaggerated on the awards name a slight bit, but you get the idea. ) i did in fact score some points and i played very well... (no matter what hugh will try to tell some of you.) i could go on and on about each game and how we really blew everyone out of the water (at the finals the score was 17-6) and we really only had one close game out of 11... but not many of you play ultimate, nor really even know what the sport is, so i will hold back and if you want details, you know where to reach me.

over the past month or so, i have been able to catch up with a bunch of people from earlier in my journeys... we had a drink in noosa with a wonderful swedish couple that we met in cairns, and then at the ultimate tourney i saw heaps of people from my time in new zealand. they all asked if i was heading back there soon and i had to tell them that it wasn't in my near future plans. (boo!) but it made me realize that these places i've been have been so wonderful that i really want to be able to go back there. that and 2 months in a country with very little money and a fear of putting things on credit means that there are a lot of places that we are skipping on the coast... for someone who wants to do it all, decision making is tough.

its a rough call though. i really want to continue to see new sights and meet new people, but at what stage do you say that where you are is where you want to be for longer? do you really want to "not go back"... i know at this point i am really looking forward to going back to the states and working at philmont... i even think that i want to actually look for a "real job". (i really shouldn't actually put that in writing, my parents might try to hold me to it)... but do i check NZ and OZ off the list of countries and say been there, done that? i think in that case this trip down under has been more than just a holiday.... it has actually been a place that i have lived in and have experienced... and though those experiences were amazing, the country can hold so much more meaning for me and can give me more if i decide to return in the future.

well, that was a bit deeper than i tend to go in emails, so i think that i have completely tired myself out and should leave you there...

i FINALLY have put some pictures online, though they are not all explained... one thing about the pictures... up in cairns hugh and i visited the Peter Lik gallery, and there we realized our quest on this trip... he maybe slightly famous, and his pictures and books are everywhere, but he is a chump and we are as talented as he (of course, we graduated from WU, its jus taht he has good equipment and we have point and shoots). we werent' going to let this hold us back and you will see if you check out the pictures that we ahve made MANY attempts at recreating peter lik type pictures... i have tried to point these out in my discriptions, and i hope you enjoy our effort.

fraser island pictures
the whitsundays pictures
drive from cairns to townsville pictures
drive from hervey bay to brisbane pictures

in sydney and going ot play ulitmate this weekend... i hope that i don't suck. we hav ebeen tossing a lot and i feel 'pretty confident' about that, but i havent run in ages, so i hop ethat i can keep up!

i am truely one of hte most apathetic when it comes to politics, and its strange when everyone asks me what i think of bush and the war (only becuase i am american and should have an opinion)... but i am relieved that i do feel save travelling still and would not dream of cutting my trip short because OZ is not necessarily lumped in with the US and UK.

ok, so this started as an email to a friedns, but i may work on it.. cause its my actaul war thoughts, which have ben way oversahdowed (in a good way) by the fun i am having.

the war is definitly a depressing even to have to look at in hte headlines and discussed on teh radio everyday, but i feel that sometihing was going to happen eventually. george bush does have his own agenda for most of it, and i feel sometimes that he is just trying to make a name for himself in the history books, but i don't htink anyone would really sit idly by anymore... it was inevitable.

i think waht really sucks is the 'friendly fire'. i just don't understand how that has killed more soldiers than actaully fighting. i don't know if poeple are scared or just worked up, but it seems wrong.

loosa in noosa

just spent a few days in noosa... your basic resort town filled with overpriced crap food and fancy holiday homes that only old poeple and the rich can live in... it was lovely though, and my tan increased about 3 fold...

saw the swedish couple from cairns... it was great to see familliar popel adn we could compare our journeys down the coast.

today we drove to brisbane to hang with ian. and whatever, our first stop was the free internet at teh library... but on the drive we did stop at "aussie world" which was about the saddest excuse for an amusement park that i have ever seen... but we walked for a bit, adn debated buying rude beer coozies... it was fun.

saviours in toyota corrollas...

warning: this email was written over the course of 2 weeks or so. therefore it makes even less sense than any of my other emails, is insanely long, and is more a collection of stories than a fluid message to you all.

2nd warning... the computer i am on hates me and funked up my font size, etc.

-------
i write this email still dripping from my shower, as clean as one can be after using a towel that has been incased in sand for three days...

we just returned from a 4x4 trip on fraser island (the largest sand island in the world) where we drove through the sea and sand with a group of 8 other backpackers in a land cruiser for 3 days... we swam in the freshwater lakes, ran at break neck speeds down soft sand into the water, cooked and camped under the stars... it was great!

i think we entered into the trip slightly on edge because the owner of the company spoke to us on the morning we left and showed us a video of deaths and accident scenes from people who didn't realize the dangers of 4x4 driving on the sand... we paid heed and played backseat driver and came back in one piece.

--------
before we got to hervey bay (and from the ending of my last email) we have travelled an astonishing 1000 kms from cairns... and we have even learned a (little) bit.

outside of townsville we stopped at the billabong sancuary where we got to get up close and personal with a bunch of typically aussie animals... kangaroos, emus, cassowaries, wombats (which don't actually look like bats at all!) and koalas. i definitely realized that i'm travelling wiht the human equivalent of a koala--brain the size of a pea, sleeps a lot, eats all the time when hes not sleeping and vain as hell... its not bad, but when he has a baby come out of a pouch i'll be worried!
----
hugh and i knew a couple of things as we started our journey from cairns...

1. he has run out of gas 3 times in his life; i enjoy seeing if the fumes can get me to washu and back twice before i drive to the farther away but cheap station on hanley rd.
2. our gas gauge is finicky which caused the people who previously owned the car to put gas in when it reached 300km.
3. it was about 20km to the next town.
4. we had gone 305 kms.

SOO.... as i started to doze off in the passengers seat i start to hear a slight bit of sputtering and i awake to see hugh pulling the car off to the side... two days previous we had thought about putting gas in the extra canister in the back, but after conviently forgetting, we spend about 10 mintues trying to find the container... then another 10 debating who is goign to hitch hike to the next town to pick up petrol. (since it was my turn to buy, i got the honor).

i stand on the side of the road, looking as forlorn as i possibly can, a lovely family (who were returning from a mornign of shopping at the biggest town in the area (complete with a grocery store and a target!)) picked me up. we drove about 10km to the next town where THERE WAS NO PETROL STATION. the town 'used' to have one, but it must not have been popular enough... or maybe people aren't stupid enough to run out of gas near it...

at this point, our next logical option was to either drive down the road to the (hopefully!) larger town of guthalumbra.. but since that was 16 more kms away, we decided it was better to go back to the veggie stand (owned by some guy they knew) that we passed and see if they had any petrol hanging around.

of course they didn't... so we (and by we, i meant the retired army general/aussie outback/crazy grandpa who up to this point i had thought was in a coma) decided that he would siphon off gas from their car. i guess this is something that happens rather frequently--the farmer at the veg stand had a hose... gramps knew how to do it... and us womenfolk just picked out veg like it was normal.

i got a ride back from a couple in a VW van who were on day one of their 15 week around OZ trip and they actually had the right attachment for our gas canister. karma!

hugh, who hadn't even been eaten by vultures or a deadly aussie animal, was just kind of enjoying the slight pause in driving was deeply involved in his book and insistend on being 'stranded' for 10 more minutes so he could finish his chapter!

we have since decided that it might actually be stemming from a different 'thingie' in the car, and (don't worry mom and dad) are getting it fixed tomorrow morning.
----
we have also been to the whitsundays since i wrote last... the whitsundays are a group of 70+ islands off the east coast and are one of the three major things you "should" do when you are in OZ. (fraser and great barrier reef are the others). We spent three lovely days on a (smallish) sailing boat with 19 other people in the middle of the ocean, sunning, and snorkelling...

it was just time to be absolutly lazy and just kind of enjoy the aussie sunshine. (is that different than the rest of my holiday?)

we went to whitehaven beach, which is proabbly one of the most photographed beaches in the world... it is absolutly gorgeous, with fine sand and crystal blue water... it would be perfect except for good ol' chironex fleckeri (the jellyfish) and his cousin (the other kind of jellyfish) who live on the shores... because of these bastards we have to wear stingers suits. one size fits nobody, lycra catsuits, black lycra suits. i can't share any pictures of those. they have been destroyed. (these are the kind of things that NO oNE looks good in.) but other than that it was wonderful...

well, if you have reached the end of the emial, i commend you...

till next time, i miss you all!

i've never shopped for 10 people before and had to keep under AU$180... it was pretty nuts. i think hugh and i argued more in that hour than we had this whole trip... it was mighty stressfull... so we are expelling our energy by writing nasty emails to our friends... i think its working ok.

going nowhere... fast.

so as we were trying to get to rockhampton (the beef capital of OZ) we had another 'slight mishap' wiht buttercup. all of a sudden the stupid car just STOPPED. i mean, no warning, no chugging, no lights, nothing.

thinking it was the petrol, we checked. ok.

since i'm not a car person, we thought about checkign other places, but of course, we couldn't tell that anythign was wrong...

so we called a tow truck and then got to the garage, and then after an hour of fiddling and couldn't find anything the silly car just started!

we didn't get it fixed, but we were much more careful driving today... we will fix it asap (hopefully!)

hugh and the koala...

this actually happened last week sometime; we went to the billabong sanctuary outside of townsville...

there we got to get up close and personal with a bunch of typically aussie animals... kangaroos, emus, cassowaries, wombats (which don't actually look like bats at all!) and koalas. i definitely realized that i'm travelling wiht the human equivalent of a koala--small brain, sleeps a lot, eats when hes not sleeping and vain as hell... its not bad, but when he has a baby come out of a pouch i'll be worried!