Blogs from Lismore, New South Wales, Australia, Oceania

We are off. Left on time at 8pm with lots of excited kids. ... read more

Our stop over in Seoul was a great experience of a widely different culture. Korean airlines was great at organising our stopover, from landing we went to their desk, they organised a motel, shuttle bus and Dinner, breaky and lunch while we were there. Our bus trip in was about an hour and very quick, our driver appeared to be in a hurry, enjoyed toting his horn and driving in two lanes at once. We were happy when we arrived at our motel, grabbed some dinner and headed to bed after our flight to have a look the following morning. Due to our flight we were wide awake at 6am. Which would normally be fine but everything in Seoul opens at 11am. We chilled out, had some breakfast, did some research and then headed for a ... read more

Morningbird and Littleflower, are still home and have not ventured north on our autumn winter sojourn, because there is trouble brewing in the shire, For the past few months there has been a massive anti Coal Seam Gas blockade happening in our own very neck of the woods at Bentley, 20ks, west of Lismore, New South Wales. It was Just amazing to see the kaleidoscope of the community getting involved to stop the gas rig from coming down from Qld, and fracking into the bedrock to get to the coal seam gas underneath. This unconventional process is very controversial in that it has the massive potential to poison the groundwater with both fracking chemicals and escaping gas into the underground aquifers. There have been several instances where farmers in C.S.G areas have been able to set ... read more

On the Road Again! It's been more than 12 months since Peter was in hospital receiving his first Chemotherapy. The year has really gone very quickly. Christmas was a lovely time for us. We were excited to be able to organize a special day where all of our family could be in the same place at the same time - THAT hasn't happened for quite some now. As you can see in the picture, the tribe is growing! Late January/ early February we had another week in Shoal Bay which was most enjoyable. We arrived the day after the area had experienced extremely high winds. A yacht and a fishing boat had been washed ashore and were well and truly stuck in the sand. It was entertaining to watch each of them being refloated by teams ... read more

Arriving in Australia was definitely a long journey! We left Minneapolis at about 5:45 P.M. on Thursday, May 24th. From Minneapolis, we had a 4 hour flight to LA. Then in LA, we boarded our 15 hour flight to Sydney. The plane was huge! There was a tv screen for each seat. We had our choice of about 30 movies & there was also tons of music. There was a map that showed the progress of our flight and the times at home & in Australia so that was pretty cool. The flight actually went better and faster than I expected. We arrived in Sydney and found out our bags were over weight and each of us had t pay $125-$150 dollars, depending how much our bags were over weight. We were slightly annoyed by this, ... read more