Tiffany and Greg Around the World
We all knew the Nemo reference had to be made right?
We took a 3 day, 2 night “sleep on the reef” excursion.
And this time we rented an underwater camera to make sure we caught everything.
Especially the sea turtle…
One of our favorite stops in Alice Springs was the Kangaroo rescue center
kinda obvious why…
Where we learned more about the complicated relationship the people of Australia have with their semi-official national ambassador…
So after having our car break down in the middle of an Australian zombie outbreak and narrowly escaping with our lives it was time to seek alternate transport.
But at least now we understood why the koalas hang out it the trees. Apparently zombies can’t climb eucalyptus. Come on, have you ever seen a zombie Koala?
[fgallery id=18 w=450 h=385 t=0 title=”zombie koalas”]
Well, after spending a week with them in the wild as they laughed at our misguided attempt to repair our car we can confidently say that neither have we.
Continue reading “Zombie Koalas”
In Australia, they don’t call it a “bull bar.” They call it a “roo bar”
And it seems like every vehicle over here has one.
And we wonder where they got the idea for Mad Max…
The first thing we did on our great Australian overland excursion was to (inadvertently!!) find out why this is so:
As we’ve previously stated, friendships lead to a lexicon whose size is directly proportional to the time invested in the relationship. These lexicons lead to key phrases that communicate much more than the simple words involved when we are lucky enough to have been together long enough to be “in the know.”
It’s not just shared experiences like stumbling up the towering mountains of New Zealand that create this shared vocabulary. Another source of this insiders verbiage is simply and consistently hashing out the meaning of words over time. Because while two people may speak the same language, they probably don’t use the same words to describe the same things. Example: what might be “cool” to one person may be “wicked” to another (“phat” could also be substituted.) Though these words may be synonyms, there are variations of meaning that make each more appropriate at different times.
There is a difference between something that is “gross” and something else that is “disgusting.” The choice of using either of these words describes more than just that fact that something is repulsive; there are nuances (for a 12 year old boy “gross” might be a good thing).
As a married couple (or anyone building a joint vocabulary) it is important to nail down these subtle differences in word use to more effectively communicate with each other.
We ran into this particular nugget of nuptial knowledge when Tiffany started calling Greg “cute.” She meant it as a compliment and Greg took it as a bit of an insult. Then Tiffany got confused:
Tiffany – “But you’re good looking. That means you’re cute!”
Greg – “No. Bunnies, baby horses and Mini Coopers are cute. I am not.”
It was at this point that a working definition of the word “cute” had to be established…
So there we were (doesn’t every great story start that way?) in Coff’s Harbour and little did we know that this would be the end of our Australian East Coast Adventure.
[fgallery id=11 w=450 h=385 t=0 title=”Great Australian East Coast Adventure”]
We were doing a bit of work at a hostel in exchange for accommodation, deciding what our next move was going to be and looking at the boats available on FindACrew.net. Huh. Imagine that! There was a boat in New Zealand looking for a couple of crew to help deliver it to Australia! We got in touch with the owner, who was willing to pay us to fly out to his boat so he could get it delivered to a transport ship in Brisbane and sent back home to the US.
He seemed like a decent guy on the phone and since he paid for the flight, we decided to take a risk and were off back to New Zealand!
Melbourne, VIC, AU
Unbeknownst to us, this job put us smack into the middle of the backpacker working trail and as a result, our workmates were not who we expected. In what we anticipated to be a primarily Australian work group we found ourselves surrounded by 2 Kiwis, 3 Germans, a Sweede, 2 French, a Scott, 2 Americans (us) and a paltry 5 Australians. The foreigners outnumbered the locals by more than 2:1. Also the overwhelming majority of employees were female or as Greg put it to his unmarried brother Chris,
“Dude, wanna meet a bunch of young European Cowgirls?”
“Then come to Australia.”
Continue reading “Mostly European Cowgirls”
Melbourne, VIC, AU
…just usually not so much on themselves.
While Greg spent the majority of his time feeding and mucking Tiffany got to “train” the horses.
At this point we should point out that Tiffany has a tendency to…smack things (Aside from Greg, that is). We’re not saying that Greg has ever been approached by a pastor at church but he has had to field a few worried glances from time to time from fellow parishioners. It came with the territory when he decided to marry a woman who gets her kicks zip lining over tropical rainforests and sailing through gale-force winds. As Tiffany puts it, “I don’t bruise easy. I just hit things hard.”
Now we’ve already gone over how these horses are half-ton hyperactive 2 year-olds that are fed nothing but sugar all day, every day, right? You put them together with Tiffany on a daily basis and well…
It keeps it interesting
From Tortoise orgies to custom made giraffe barns, the Great Kiwi Roadtrip makes it’s way to the Auckland Zoo!
One of the things that we absolutely had to see in New Zealand was an actual live kiwi
(Finally: the bird, not to be confused with the people by the same name)
Being as we were road tripping the length of the country these birds call home, we thought this was going to be relatively easy. Turns out that it’s not…
Continue reading “Kiwis (The birds, not the people)”
As long as you don’t mind the pressing need to bundle up in order to explore a land listed as “one of the closest to Antarctica” it’s sometimes hard to decide which is more magnificent, the countryside around Dunedin or the immaculate buildings in the city itself:
