peeing in the bushes: Oz

Since I last posted about how we were getting on after the trail, we've visited Australia, rung in a new year, moved to Michigan, and I've been accepted to a graduate residency program in environmental education and nonprofit administration in Washington state.

So I guess I'll start with Australia.

We flew down there at the end of October and spent a couple of days catching up with jet-lag and trying to understand the fact that we were on the bottom half of the world in Sydney.

Too pretty of a day to be so sleepy.

Then we headed up to a town called Gosford (actually a suburb called Wyoming, humorously enough), where we worked for a wonderful family for three weeks. The Smalls own and operate a biodynamic farm that supplies them with most of their produce, meat and milk. There, we learned that Australians have the craziest birds, and that all of those birds are loud. We also learned that cows can poop a whole awful lot, and that cow poop is heavy.

Don Small made this giant slip 'n slip for his grandkids.

Then we took off across the east coast of Australia. We decided that we couldn't visit the continent without either seeing the Great Barrier Reef or Uluru (Ayer's Rock), and that Uluru would probably be around a lot longer than the Great Barrier Reef, so we took a day-cruise out to snorkel at the reef.

You can't see it, but there's a seahorse on that coral.

But before we got there, we spent a week hiking across an island made entirely of sand:

dingo!

And visited the Blue Mountains:

After all that, we hitchhiked down to the house of a friend we met on Fraser Island, where we were treated to incredible hospitality, delicious food, and rides out to amazing places: