What do you get when you buy blue sparkle nail polish and raspberry bubble bath? A great vacation!

Now, for those of you shaking your heads and wondering what on earth that has got to do with our trip to the Land Down Under, I really do have a good response. I have learned over the years that a vacation is what you make of it, how you set expectations, and how you set the tone for it. I have also learned how much my kids need to identify with us parents...what makes us happy, relaxed, etc. For Caroline, we have a tradition of getting one new nail polish color together each trip. And we do our nails the same. For New Year's in Australia, we got blue sparkle nail polish (a clear tone with literal sparkle confetti inside). We put that over our pink first coat for sparkly New Year toes! My kids know that a good book or X-Files episode while sitting in a warm bubble bath is a favorite way of relaxing for me, so we bought a huge bottle of Aussie bubbles and that's how we relaxed at the end of most days (not in the tub all together!)....each taking turns in the warm bubbles in the fun big bath tubs of our serviced apartments. We even brought Scuba-Diver Barbie along to enjoy bubble baths and the apartment pool; we did not escort her to the Great Barrier Reef, however, much to Barbie's great disappointment. She did not have the proper diving certification. :) We also brought along Slamwich, a new game we got for Christmas, and we had fun playing that in the evenings. When I remember this trip to Australia and Guam, it will be not just the furry koalas I got to pet, but it will be our small celebrations as well, complete with bubbles and sparkles! It was how to relax together in a different place. It was how to feel at home.

Thank you for your patience with my first paragraph. Now onto other stuff...Australia was a wonderful experience....the kids did great, and we got to do more than I thought we would. It was all about expectation. We expected them to need "down" days of just playing and not high-paced running around, and they actually did better than we thought. We accomplished much more in each city (Cairns and Sydney) than we thought we would. Nobody was sick (other than one small wheezing attack), we had safe travels, and we mostly had gorgeous weather. We attribute that to our prayers and the prayers of our dear ones for us ahead of time. God does indeed care about the things we pray about and that we share with Him. Cairns had a nice tropical feel....hot like Miami and sticky like Kwaj. We were certainly not out of our element there, even though the a/c was welcomed! It was a lovely smaller-town feel. Tour buses pick you up for most of your booked attractions, although Mark did drive the "other side of the road and other side of the car," Aussie way on the one day we rented a car to drive to Port Douglas and the Hartley's Crocodile Adventures park. Sydney, on the other hand, was a bustling city but cleaner than many U.S. cities. We got around there mostly by walking city blocks, ferry, monorail, and subway. It was cooler in temperature but still experiencing the Australian summer.

Before I get to koalas and crocodiles, I want to comment on Aussie culture in general. People are wonderfully friendly and very welcoming to families. Even ticket pricing at zoos and other adventures was geared toward saving families money. We stayed in serviced apartments for several reasons: Families with more than 2 kids have a hard time finding a hotel room anywhere that doesn't insist on getting two rooms; we had a kitchen to save on meals by cooking a few dinners and fixing our breakfast every day in the room; and laundry facilities were right in our apartment room. This way we travelled light with only 5 outfits each and could launder as we needed. I discovered that zip lock bags were handy for everything from doling out laundry powder amounts to packing David's allergy-friendly meals. We discovered that the Aussies have outlet switches for every outlet so when you want the power "off" for the outlet you use for your toaster, you simply switch that one off. They also have a "half flush" and "full flush" option on their toilets (I have seen this elsewhere as well) to save water and only use a big flush when necessary. Isn't this exactly what you wanted to know about Australia? I'm glad I could help! :) Truly, my only complaint is that, although there are a few great coffee houses, overall, their coffee culture doesn't meet my coffee snob standards. They do french-press a lot of their coffee, but I just wasn't digging their java too much. That’s not bad as my only complaint! :)

A few words about words, as my oldest son was so intrigued by this, and hopefully we adults got to using the right terminology by the end of the trip:

U.S. English /Aussie English

Target (the store) = target. (yes, with the period!)

Stroller =  Pram or pusher

Ketchup = Tomato sauce

Vacation = Holiday

Sprite = Lemonade

Elevator= Lift

Soccer = Football

Swimsuit = Cozy

Burger King = Hungry Jack's

Drugstore = Chemist

Parking Lot = Car park

French fries = Chips

and my personal favorite...

Green/red peppers = Capsicum

Yes, indeedy, we tried to order peppers on our pizza only to find out they didn't know what we meant. We later cracked the code: Ask for capsicum! :)

[I know my South African friends will laugh at me as they use much of the same terminology, and I should be used to it by now after communicating with them all of these years. :) ]

One highlight of the vacation: Mark got to scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef (outer reef), while the older two kids and I got to snorkel out there. Three-year-old David wore a life jacket and can claim that he indeed did "swim" in the Great Barrier Reef. :) The older two kids and I enjoyed a brief ride on a semi-submersible, where we saw Nemo's complete set of Reef friends.

In addition to our day out on the Reef, while in Cairns, we also took the Kuranda Scenic Railway through the Kuranda rainforest, seeing gorges and waterfalls; we then took the SkyRail back, which was perhaps one of the highlights for the kids--whether it was the cool SkyRail across the treetops or the torturing Mommy, who is afraid of heights, I'm not sure. :) While in Kuranda, we went to Kuranda Koala Gardens, where I held a koala while the kids pet it. It was very snuggly. It is also one of the few places left in Australia that let you cuddle a koala anymore. They are allowed to be cuddled for only 30 minutes a day. We also were able to pet a mommy kangaroo with a joey hanging out of her pouch. And the kids also visited a Venom Zoo where all 3 kids held a python together, and they heard an explanation on the tarantulas, scorpions, and millipedes.

Hartley's Crocodile Adventures was a wonderful experience. The kids saw a live "Croc attack" show and then saw it reenacted again live outside their ferry window as we boated through salt-water-croc-infested waters. At this park, the kids also saw many other native Aussie animals and pet a baby crocodile. We heard about the 10 most poisonous snakes in the world that reside in Australia. To the kids' delight, we also learned that for a short time when they are weaning, baby koalas (joeys) eat their mommy's poo to develop a good stomach lining and digestive system. This was definitely a popular discussion among our almost-9-, almost-6-, and 3-year-old children!

On our last day in Cairns, we enjoyed walking down the Esplanade, frolicking at a huge sprinkler playground that took up an entire city block, and then swimming in the Esplanade lagoon pool that is geared toward children with shallow waters and a slow gradation that slopes like beach waters...sand and all. It had fun decorative sprinklers and also took up a city block. It was a fun, free attraction along the beach front, especially at this time of year when there are "stinger nets" and alerts out because of the high population of painful "stinger" jellyfish in the waters of tropical Cairns. This is where the name "stinger suit" comes from...something scuba enthusiasts probably already know.

Another note about our time in Cairns was that at night, after the kids went to bed, we'd sit on the balcony and read. It was incredible to hear the different bird life chirping and communicating....definitely sounded very lively and different than the birds we even have on Kwajalein. It truly felt like you were in a rainforest. It was one of my first "senses" to experience Australia, and it was very memorable. It was the first time I felt like I really was somewhere a bit different than I'd been before. Mark felt that way as he saw the taxi buzzing us down the “wrong” (according to American highway laws) side of the street! :)

On to Sydney we went, where we discovered they have Family Fun Days on Sunday where you can ride the subway and buses all day cheaply, so we planned our Sunday outing to be the furthest away from the city so we could get more bang for our buck. We rode southwest of Sydney to the wonderful Featherdale Wildlife Park, which was one of my favorite places. There we fed kangaroos and wallabies out of our hands, pet more koalas, and saw some amazing wildlife, like a Tasmanian Devil. The kids were able to get much more hands-on with the animals here. David was absolutely enamored with wallabies at his eye level! It was very hard to pull him away, until he accidentally tripped on one of their legs, and then he was very sad thinking he had hurt the animal (he didn't).

The next day we visited the infamous Sydney Aquarium, which was one of the best aquariums I have ever been to. It had several tunnels under which you could walk and see manta rays, tiger sharks, and all sorts of creatures swimming above you. It was there that we met the only two dugongs in captivity in the Southern Hemisphere (dugongs are similar to manatees....sailors used to think they were mermaids). That week, we also went to the Taronga Zoo, where you ferry over and take a cable car up to the top where you can look out and see the amazing Sydney Harbour, Sydney Opera House, and famous Harbour Bridge as you walk down through the zoo. We decided to try out Sydney's very small-attraction and very old theme park, Luna Park, where the kids went down huge slides in sacks and rode traditional rides like carousels, the ferris wheel, and bumper cars (ask David what a thrill that was for a three-year-old who doesn't regularly ride cars on Kwajalein to actually be crashing them!). The only attraction playing at the Sydney Opera House for an affordable price and targeted toward children was Le Grand Cirque, an amazing contortionist and trapeze/stunt circus performance that entertained our kids thoroughly, except for David, who preferred to rock his own theatre seat and take notes to try performing the stunts at home (wish I was kidding!), but at least we experienced the famous Opera House in some way. And we ended the week in a way that suited our oldest son quite well: The Powerhouse Museum, which to his delight had a Star Wars hands-on exhibit as well as many other science-type exhibits. It was complete with a 3-to-6-year-old section where you could pretend to be a construction worker and load bricks (made of foam), build houses, assembly-line the bricks, etc. Caroline and David had the time of their lives being "Wendy" and "Bob the Builder" for an hour.

As a side note, some of the native Aussie animals we met and learned about throughout our entire trip were: kukkuburras and cassowaries (both birds), wombats, wallabies, wallaroos, kangaroos, koalas, dingoes, bilbies (like a rabbit), flying foxes, green tree frogs, blue-tongued lizards, ghost bats, sea turtles (Crush and Squirt on "Finding Nemo") and blue penguins.

A words about flights and Guam. Our only flight option from Kwajalein is Continental Micronesia. We could either fly 5.5 hours the opposite direction to Honolulu to catch a direct flight to Cairns, or we could fly the "island hopper" (actually a very big plane) more directly that touches down in several of the Federated States of Micronesia before getting to Guam. It touched down in Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk (most Americans know this island as "Truck") before heading to Guam. We thought this would be horrible as a flight....taking almost 7 hours to get there with all of the stops, but it actually was nice to get off for 30 minutes at each of these islands. We spent one night and day in Guam before boarding an 8 PM flight to Australia. Guam is like Hawaii...very American in a tropical setting. It has a nice beach front and some fun shopping, but one day was plenty for us to fill since it was just a stopover. It allowed the kids to rest. Coming back, we flew a 1:30 AM flight to Guam and then 6 AM on to Kwajalein, arriving 5:20 PM on Kwaj (two-hour difference), so it made for a long day, but the kids slept on and off through most of the flights. It was not too horrible.

This blog truly doesn't do our recent trip to the Southern Hemisphere justice, and for those of you just joining our blogs, please don't read this as a "braggy Christmas letter." We just wanted to recount the highlights and express the wonderment of seeing another part of the world. It was a vacation of a lifetime, and we are so grateful we got to go while we live in this part of the world. Our oldest son had to work on the plane on an outline for a talk he is giving in his third grade class this week. It had to be on something he was very familiar with to practice oral presentation for 10 minutes. He was able to write out his experiences of his trip, and it actually helped me form my "report" for this blog. I am so grateful our children had this enriching experience. We learned a lot about ourselves, our level of patience (we did pretty well most days, overall), and our ability to adapt and be guests in another country (again...we do that every day here on Kwaj, but in the relatively "familiar" presence of many other Americans). We learned how big the world is and how cultures blend everywhere you go, making the history unique and the culture rich. We appreciated that, other than the "getting on each other's nerves" and typical arguments, our kids travelled very well and "went with the flow." We tried to take on the popular Aussie saying: "No worries, Mate!" and hopefully we brought a little bit of that back with us. If you ask 3-year-old David to articulate his feelings about his trip to Australia, he would likely say he mostly was excited to see Nemo in the underwater observatory, to hold a python, and to hand-feed a kangaroo. How many 3-year-olds can say they've done that? Now, if only such an accomplished 3-year-old was potty-trained.....hmmm...

(As for pictures, we need a few days, but we will get them up on the photo album part of the site soon. Also, I plan to finish writing a blog on what charity and giving look like on Kwaj during the Christmas season. I was so proud of our women's charity organization and what they accomplished this holiday season, and I think it is of some interest to see how the cultures blend in "exchange dinners," supply "drops" to outer islands, and toy drives here in the Marshalls! Stay tuned.)