Check the road, mate

Wild bunch of days in Australia. I need to get my camera working because I would love to add some photos to the blog.

So ... nice to have a few visitors, Ethan and Molly have spent the last few days in Aussie (they are visiting Sydney right now) and we've had a rather grand time. The highlight was a day trip (my off day, I promise I'm working here) to Philips Island which is about 90km south of Melbourne and right on the Bass Straight (between Australia and Tasmania) which connects to the Indian Ocean and then south to Antarctica.

Going to Philips Island felt a little bit like being on a small little American beach town, little boardwalk, nice beaches, a few main roads. Only with some of the best Australian wildlife one could imagine. (Imagine if Montauk or Bethany Beach had Koalas) I promise I'll attach photos later, but we saw Koalas, Kangaroos, Wallabies, incredible birds and little tiny penguins. These animals were incredible. The Koalas (not a bear, but rather a marsupial) are having serious extinction issues in Aussie, so we went to protected national park where they are protected and a few dozen of these little bundles of joy are living and trying to reproduce. They really are incredible animals and we found a few that weren't sleeping and moved around a little for us, even though most of them sit perched in a tree and do nothing but nap.

In the preserve we also saw a host of birds and a wallaby (which is like a small kangaroo). I had no idea what a kangaroo or wallaby actually looked like. But to watch it hop away was really incredible. We didn't see a kangaroo until later on in the evening when, as we were driving on a quiet road on the Island, a Kangaroo hopped in front of my car and I needed to slam on the breaks to avoid hitting it. Seriously! I'm not making this up. We've all seen deer run across the road in the US. Here wallabies and 'roos turn into road kill. Note -- Ethan really wants to eat a kangaroo, they sell the meat in the grocery store. Hey mate, fire up the barbie.

The island is most famous for the daily penguin parade. Hundreds of proud penguins dress up in leather and drag and waddle to the beat of house music while waving rainbow flags. Actually, it's really quite amazing. These little foot high penguins, gather in the shallows at dusk and as little teams of 5 to 15 waddle from the beach to the sand dunes after a day of fishing. They find there mates and chicks who have been burrowed in the dunes. They gather as groups to help avoid predators and they do it right at dusk every single day. It was really incredible -- the only problem that it was such a tourist attraction that the number of tourists outnumbered the number of penguins.

In other news: I drove on the wrong side of the road yesterday. Molly became a member of Joy FM -- Melbourne's LGBT radio station. Am even happier that the Giants beat the Patriots. Have adopted an Aussie Rules Football team. French Press Coffee is called plunger coffee -- "would you like your coffee out of a plunger?" Have not tried Vegemite. Also -- tomorrow is the shortest day of the year.