One year in Oz

We've been here for just over a year! Can you believe it? I remember writing home to my sister about two weeks into it, crying, and telling her that I wanted to go home. She told me that it would get easier and that the year would fly by. I didn't believe her, but wouldn't you know it? She was right!

Of course, it hasn't hurt that we've had visitors almost nonstop since December, and that we went home for a visit in June and that I went home again in September/October. It also doesn't hurt that we've been able to visit some amazing places since we've been here (just wait for the Kakadu post) and we've got even more trips planned.

For now we're smack dab in the middle of our second spring in the Southern Hemisphere. The jacarandas are in full bloom and the days are warm and dry and they're predicting the warm and dry weather to continue all summer, thanks to El Nino.

I think it will be too hard to summarize the past year, but that's the point of the blog, isn't it? If you want a relive any moments, just use the directory over to the right there.------>

Here we are a year ago. Obviously, this was taken when we were still in California.

When Roxy was still Bruce.

Here we are now (well, a few weeks ago in the Northern Territory):

Croc-free waters.

If you haven't visited us yet, you still have time! Plan your trip! Buy your tickets! (Try to avoid December, January and February, though. It gets pretty warm 'round these parts.) Thanks to all of our previous visitors, I know all of the best places to take out-of-towners for day trips. Like this place:

Moreton Island: Just a short ferry ride away.

Or this place, just an hour's drive:

Mt. Ngungun. If a baby can hike it, so can you!

Or this place:

North Stradbroke Island looks like California, but the water is warm and there are kangaroos.

We've got a couple of empty months coming up. We don't have anyone scheduled to visit us, so we're going to have to do some exploring on our own.

(This post is a bit scatterbrained, but it's better than nothing, right?)

Our new-to-us car

1988 Ford Laser

After we got home from California, we decided to buy ourselves a car. We did 8 months without one and decided that now that the baby is a bit older, we should start taking weekends trips to discover the country around us.

After hemming and hawing for a few weeks, we finally settled on that beauty above. The price was right and the best part is that it only has 50,000 kms! Sure, it doesn't have power steering or fuel injection, but it does have air conditioning and new tires.

Car insurance as we know it costs about the same as it does at home, but registration (or "rego" as they call it here) is quite expensive! We paid close to $700 to register the car for the year. Half of the rego goes to a different insurance company for Compulsory Third Party (CTP) insurance. CTP covers damages to the other guy in case of an accident and our personal insurance pays damage to our car. That means we still paid about $350 to the state to register a 21-year-old car.

Nate still bikes to work, so Rox and I have the car all day to putter around town. We're expecting another lot of visitors this week (Eddie and Lisa's parents on a layover from PNG on Wednesday, Eliza and Andrew on Thursday, Becky and Lindsay on Monday), so picking them all up from the airport will be a breeze!