It is easy to forget how big and diverse Australia really is. Although it is technically a continent, it might be easy just to think of it as a large island when you cursively glance at it on a map. The fact is it’s a continent and is not that dissimilar in size to the United States. The U.S. however, has about 275 million more people. An example of this is we boarded our plane in Melbourne early one Monday morning and it was about 65 degrees. We flew for 2 ½ hours and stepped off our plane in Uluru (Ayers [View Full Entry]

---

---

We’re back on the mainland of Australia after having taken a 6 AM flight from Hobart to Melbourne which included getting on the wrong bus and having to run to catch the right one. With all our luggage in tow! It is good to laugh at ourselves. We arranged for a shuttle bus to the airport at 4:45 AM and they said they would pick us up around the corner from our hotel. While we waited there, a shuttle pulled up in front of our hotel. We quickly brought our stuff back down there and loaded it on the bus. After [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hi Everyone! Thanks again for all of your wonderful e-mails. You don’t know how much we appreciate hearing from you. We’ve been on the road 178 days and out of our country for 115 days. We miss all of you and appreciate all of your e-mails and comments. Thanks for keeping in touch. We are very excited to tell you about our time in Tasmania. It is a beautiful island state just southeast of mainland Australia. We spent 7 days and it was over in a blink. We realize now that you could easily spend 3 or 4 weeks touring around [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hello again from the South Island….. We’ve decided that scones are woefully underrated!!! New Zealand offers wonderful scones in most towns. We’ve decided that America needs more scones. It makes us long for our next door neighbor in Tampa-- Mildred always made the best scones!!! We also wanted to mention that it is a different experience being south of the equator. It is quite strange when we drive south and it gets colder—because we are going further away from that invisible meridian called the equator. This makes the north island of this nation the [View Full Entry]

---

---

Beauty Abounds!! There is so much to see and to do in New Zealand that you will need more than several weeks we have to take a good look. We spent almost one week on the North Island and 3 and a half weeks on the south island and we feel like we are just getting a quick glance. It is a simply beautiful country and the roads curve through hills and mountains and it slows your travel so you can have a better view. In our previous blog, we forgot to tell you a cute story. While we were in [View Full Entry]

---

---

Greetings from New Zealand’s North Island……..we’ve had a wonderful time exploring the north part of this island nation. New Zealand is much cooler and less humid than Asia and we are seriously enjoying the change in the weather. It is not quite summer here and we actually have worn shoes and sweaters for the first time since……Seattle! Some of these clothes we’ve been shlepping around are now coming in handy. We flew from Bali to Kuala Lumpur to Auckland. The flight from KL to Auckland was 9 hours and 45 minutes. We are now 18 hours ahead o [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hi! We would like to start this blog off with a request/ challenge. We have a good friend in Olympia who has a son named Jayson. He is currently in 3rd grade and learning about our world. He has recently started a worldwide stamp collection and we’ve been trying to help him by sending a postcard from each country that we have traveled to. I would like to ask that each of you write down his address and when you travel outside the US in the next few months please send him a postcard from whatever country you are in. I [View Full Entry]

---

---

Ubud, Bali After 5 great days in Lovina Beach, we traveled a little over 2 hours to reach the town of Ubud. The drive takes 2 hours, but the actual distance is only about 40 or 50 km. The roads wind through the volcanic hills of Bali and through many villages along the way. Bali is a very green island thanks to the rich soil and abundance of precipitation. We are here during the rainy season, but it has been unusually dry according to the residents. The land still appears quite green and lush, despite the fact that the rains have [View Full Entry]

---

---

Selamat siang from Bali! This blog is one of three we hope to publish regarding our travels in Bali. We are going to be in three different locations in Bali, each of which has a distinct flavor. Bali is only one of the 13,000 islands in Indonesia, which is part of the world’s largest archipelago. We’ve divided our time in Bali to three locations: Lovina Beach in the north, Ubud in the central and Kuta Beach in the south. We would have loved to go to the island of Lompok but we didn’t have enough time. Sounds funny coming from us, [View Full Entry]

---

---

Sun, sand, beaches, beaches and beaches. Hello to everyone and we hope that the holiday was kind to you all and you got your fill. It is hard to believe sometimes that we have been delightfully unemployed for over 4 months and have spent the last 2+ months in Asia. At this point, we decided it was time to take a brief respite from all this fun! Believe it or not, all this traveling is a bit tiring and we needed to kick back for a little while. Now when you stop laughing, remember that this should never be construed as [View Full Entry]

---

---