Adelaide wins as some of the strangest weather I have ever experienced.  It is getting into the fall here, which means cold and rain.  Luck for me though, it doesnt get really cold here.  I havent seen a real winter jacket being sold anywhere and the buildings dont even have heating because it doesnt get cold enough to use it.  My room gets really cold at night though, so I wish they did have heat.  Adelaide gets a bit colder than some places though because we get the Artic winds.  This just means that I have to have layers because as I'm walking to Uni in the sun I get so warm and then all of a sudden a freezing cold gust of wind will come along and I have to put on 2 jackets.

Last week we had tons of rain.  There were some pretty bad storms because a lot of the beaches were really torn up, but it wasn't like storms at home.   There was no thunder and lightning and the sky never even got really dark.   

Has anyone else ever taken a holiday from their holiday?  Momma and I got breakfast delivered to our room while laying in bed at the hotel and laid by the pool everyday in Cairns.  The week before however, was a different story.  My mom got here last Sunday and she was pretty jetlagged so we just hung around in Adelaide, shopping and going to the beach on Sunday and Monday.  Tuesday morning we had an early start for our adventure to Kangaroo Island. 

            We had to get a cab at 6am to the bus station, where we got picked up by our tour guide for the trip, in a cramped little van.  We then drove for an hour and a half through the Adelaide Hills to get to ferry that we took for 45 minutes to Kangaroo Island.  We then packed ourselves back up into the little van and headed off on our two day adventure. 

            After some stops at different look out points, we headed to Seal Bay, which is exactly how it sounds.  The whole beach is covered with seals.  A tour guide took us down onto the beach where we came really close to some and we even got to watch a momma seal teaching the baby seal how to swim!  Afterwards, we headed to the Little Sahara for sand boarding.  I climbed straight up one of the sand dunes and it is way harder than it looks.  I will never again complain about walking up a hill because for every step up these dunes, I slid back down half way.  The slide back down wasn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it would be either.  Basically, it was like sledding down a hill, but if you fall off you roll around in sand until there isn’t an inch of you not covered in sand. 

            When we made it to the cottage we were staying in , we were a bit surprised.  From the outside it was really cute.  It was in a really remote area and had a campfire out front, but the inside was so gross!  The place smelled so bad and it was so dirty.  Im pretty sure it hasn’t been cleaned since it was built.  The beds were pretty gross too.  Mom and I washed all of our clothes as soon as we got back cause we definitely thought we were going to get bed bugs.  Luckily this was only for one night and we didn’t spend too much time inside.  After dark we got to go out looking for penguins.  Luckily we got to see a few hiding in the bushes, but the best thing was definitely the stars.  There were more stars than I have ever seen in my life.  They continued all the way down to the horizons on all sides making it look like we were in a dome.  We could see the Milky Way too which was so amazing! 

            The next day we went to go see some of the other sites on KI like the Remarkable Rocks and stuff.  We got to stop at  a koala park too and momma and I found a koala in a tree.  It was really low to the ground and it was awake, which is awesome.  Koalas are only awake for 4 hours everyday, the rest of the day is spent sleeping.  Also there are hundreds of types of eucalyptus tree and koalas only like to eat 20 or so.  The ones they eat are drugs so the koalas get really high from eating and then sleep even more.  I think that’s so funny!!

            A few days after this we went on our holiday to Cairns.  We stayed in the Novotel Cairns Oasis Resort.  It was so great to stay in a hotel since I have become very used to hostels.  The bed was definitely the most comfortable bed I have slept in, in a long time.  One of the first things we noticed were the huge bats that hung in trees near our hotel.  They were the biggest bats I’ve ever seen and a little bit creepy.  Our first day there Mom found a house boat for sale.  I think she should have gotten it.  I mean living on a house boat in Cairns, Australia sounds pretty great to me.  We also went to the botanical gardens because I had read about a rainforest walk that I wanted to do.  As it turned out, it was boardwalk a few feet wide and only a few inches above a swamp.  The boards were kind of squeaky and there were no handrails to hold on to.Mom was convinced that a crocodile was going to come out.

 Cairns is one of the main cities to get to the Great Barrier Reef, so the second day we did a tour out to the outer reef.  Mom made me wear a lycra suit in the water that made me look like an alien.  It was bright blue with a hood and mittens.  That paired with the goggles, snorkel and fins, we all looked really weird.  Snorkeling was so amazing though.  Heaps of fish were swimming around the platform where you get into the water off the pontoon.  The fish were crazy, from tiny orange and yellow ones to a blue and green one that was almost the size of me.  I saw tons within the coral everywhere.  I got really upset though because I kept running into these two other people who kept touching the coral.  They would break off pieces and touch them.  It made me really angry because the Great Barrier Reef is a World Heritage area and coral is living thing. 

            Mom and I didn’t do much else while in Cairns.  We mostly went shopping and laid around by the pool.  One morning we even got breakfast delivered to the room!  The one night while we were out shopping, we watched as these crazy birds flew in flocks and dive bombed in front of cars as they were driving by.  It was so crazy , like suicidal birds!  While we were in one of the shops, one of the birds flew in through the door and smashed into the window behind the girl working there.  The bird got stuck between the window and a picture frame.  The girl working there ran out and got a random guy off the street to help get the bird unstuck.  Between the crazy birds, the bats and the threat of crocodiles, we had quite the adventurous week. 

             I was really glad to have Momma here for a while.  It was funny though.  She let me take care of all the travel arrangements and planning.  When we would go somewhere, like the hotel, the people working there would look to her for confirmation, but I was the one who knew what was going on an what we were doing.  I was really sad when Momma went home, but the rest of the time will go by so fast.

For the last week I have been really hung up on the fact that here instead of gummi bears, they have jelly babies.  The little jellies are shaped like babies and I think it is the weirdest thing.  Who would want to eat babies?

 In Australia, Tasmania is the butt of most jokes.  Since it is isolated from the rest of the country, people say that everyone there is related.  Most of the jokes have to do with people having two heads, one tooth or just being bogan (hillbilly).  The first person I met there was the shuttle driver from the airport to the hostel and he was definitely bogan.  When he smiled and only had one tooth I wanted to laugh so hard because it was exactly what everyone had told me.  Luckily, every other person I met there was normal.  

I flew in to Hobart on Friday and immediately made my way over to the Cadbury chocolate factory to meet up with Allie and two of her friends.  I hadn't eaten all day, so I proceeded to eat my weight in free chocolate and then felt incredibly sick afterwards, but it was really fun.  They have a store in the factory where you can buy all the Cadbury chocolates for really cheap.  Of course I bought a ton and have eaten half of it already.  I also decided to buy this giant box of Cadbury Raisin Brunch Bars for $12, thinking that the box was filled with individual boxes of the bars.  When we got outside and opened it, it was just a giant bag filled with unwrapped bars.  All four of us ate these bars all weekend and somehow I still ended up bringing home like 100!

I also got to drive on the wrong side of the road in Tassie.  Saturday morning we rented a car to drive to Cradle Mountain.  I was the first one to drive and ended up driving the whole 5 hours to Cradle Mountain.  The roads were crazy small and curvy.  It was a little bit scary, but we made it and driving on the wrong side of the road is much easier than I thought it would be.  My biggest problem was that everything in the car is flipped, so I kept hitting the windshield wipers when I was trying to use my turn signal.  We also saw some sort of road kill, about every 10 minutes.  It was pretty gross.  We were also really sad because we wanted to see a Tasmanian devil, but we didnt see any live ones.  We also thought it was so funny that all of the big towns marked on the map were not big towns at all.  We would think, okay we are coming up on a big place and there would be a few restaurants and buildings and then thats it.  Even Hobart, as one of their biggest cities, was not a real city.

By the time we got to Cradle Mountain, it was around 2 pm.  It was really cold and we didnt have time to do a really long hike, so we just did a 2 hour hike around one of the lakes.  It was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.  I actually texted one of my friends from Tassie and told her that I was going to move in with her because I loved it so much.  We were driving back to Hobart when it got dark and the stars were so amazing.  Earlier last week I had gone to the beach with a few people at 6am to swim and look at the stars.  It is weird that theres different stars in the sky.  I kept looking for the big dipper.  Not being near a big city though, the stars were absolutely amazing.  

Sunday we drove down to Bruny Island just off the South East corner of Tassie.  Again, we kept laughing at how small everything was.  One of the big places to see on the island was Blighs Museum.  The whole museum was about the size of our living room at home.  We did get to see a penguin though.  We mostly just drove around the island since it was raining and really cold out.  Back in Hobart, we went on this ghost tour of one of the old penitentiaries.  It was pretty dumb, but the scariest part was the fact that the guy giving the tour looked EXACTLY like one of the photos of a prisoner names Isaac Daly.  He might have been the only ghost there.