A New Year, A New Place

I see that I did not keep the promise I made in my last post to upload more photos from our recent trip to Australia. We've been a tad busy. Upon our return to Mongolia, we embarked on a complicated, crazy project ... moving back to Virginia. Many plans had to be made and details worked out for the logistics relating to this International move. We've had a lot of moving experience, but this time there was an added layer of difficulty in that we wanted to make it all happen in a very short time frame so that the kids could begin school in VA by the first day of FCPS second semester. Our whole family did not move back to VA, however. Although Charles was able to take a couple weeks off and accompany us to VA to help get us set up, he has returned to Mongolia to finish his tour and will likely join us here at the end of the summer.

Sadly, all of this left me no time for blogging over the past two months.

However ... now that the dust has settled from the move, here are some more photos of beautiful Gold Coast near Brisbane, Queensland Australia. (ok, LOTS of photos ...)

actually this one is from Incheon Airport, South Korea

first day in Mermaid Beach on the Gold Coast ... heading to the beach to play

gorgeous white sand and blue water

Broadbeach off in the distance

Look! A mermaid spotted at Mermaid Beach!

On the day before Christmas, we explored the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary

we rode this little train

we learned about echidnas

and tasmanian devils

and hung out with some kangaroos

and fed them from our hands

an emu kept pecking at something that was stuck to the bottom of Brian's shoe

we rode the train some more

we saw the koalas

and a wombat eating sweet potatoes

spied a tree kangaroo

and it rained on us a little so we wore these plastic rain poncho things while we fed the roos again

Then it was Christmas - so we made this "Christmas tree" on our wall

St. Nicholas found us!

and he left us some goodies

they all got Minecraft t-shirts

and other good stuff

we played at the beach again and collected shells ... the wind made the sea all choppy so we didn't swim

we had a BBQ instead

Next we explored Wet -n- Wild water park ... see Brian being squirted in the foreground? Ian and Ashley are about to get splashed by the large bucket dump

Ian is in the green shirt

Ian rubbing the water out of his eyes after coming down this big slide

another water slide

Ian, Ashley & Brian are at the far right of this photo ... after a day of water fun

Something more relaxing ... we went fishing and Ian caught the first fish

and he caught the most fish, too

a black swan swims past to check things out

Ian helped me net the fish I caught

Brian had fun feeding this little piggy

Charles relaxing with his fly rod

Brian tried his hand at some spin casting

Ashley caught a few fish

some Mini-Golf fun

a funny orange cat that made this putt tricky

our new friend, huggy koala

Super fun trip! So happy to have finally had the chance to visit Australia. Would LOVE to go again!