Australia Day
Jan 26th, 2005 by admin
Today is Australia Day – which is a celebration of Australia’s federation. Sort of similar to July 4 in the states. I guess for years the day wasn’t celebrated too much, but recently it’s become something more important to the Aussies.
It’s also my 1 year anniversary of landing in Australia! Whoo hoo!
Unfortunately, today’s weather was rainy & windy and not a great day to sit at the beach drinking XXXX beer, eating Lamingtons & Pavlovas and singing Australia Fair. So, we stayed home and watched good ol’ american films: Roger Rabit & A League of Their Own. I did watch about 1/2 hour of cricket.
Speaking of cricket – Colette & I had our introduction to a live cricket match on Friday in Brisbane. It was a day/nighter which, obviously, is a lot shorter than the more traditional 5-day test matches. A day/nighter starts around 1pm and goes about 8 hours. There are 50 ‘overs’ per team where an over is 6 ‘bowls’ (pitches). So, the first team bats and are usually batting for about 4 hours! Of course, it was extremely HOT! I think it was in the upper 90′s and we kept annoying everyone in the rows around us by ducking back into the shade every 20 minutes. 3/4 of the stadium was in shade, but not our section! After a few hours we left the stadium and went to a pub and sat in the A/C and watched the game on the tv. A much wiser decision! We meant to go back after sunset to watch Australia bat, but then the thunderstorms rolled in. The game got delayed so Colette & I left around 6 or so. I guess they tried to start the game again after 9pm but ended up cancelling it later. What must be frustrating to the West Indies is that the game doesn’t count!! Not enough overs were thrown while the Australians were up so the game doesn’t count. After about 10 hours of playing, the game is just dropped. And the Windies had a good chance of beating the Aussies!
On the way to the game the car’s fuel gage suddenly croaked and, once we got into town, it started to overheat. We weren’t sure we would make it, but it survived. Although, the gage is now permanently stuck on Full. We’ll probably have to fix that at some point.
Saturday we went for a nice walk in Noosa’s park and saw loads of wild bush turkeys as well as a koala! The koala was sleeping in a tree in the parking lot of all places! How fun!
New pictures have also been uploaded.