Blue Mountains... Take One (Jenolan Caves)

I know it's been a while since I last updated the site, so I figured I would go back to Easter Weekend and post some of our adventures! We had an amazing Long Easter Weekend where we stayed in Wentworth Falls (part of the Blue Mountains). We spent one day abseiling (repelling) down waterfalls and off of 30m cliffs and went canyoning and hiking. Keep your eyes peeled for a new posting of that adventure.

We also spent one day at the Jenlon Caves which are these HUGE, amazing caves that date back to the 1800's. They are the oldest discovered open caves in the world. We took a tour with about 40 people and walked through the caves and gave us some history on the different parts of the caves. There was one area of the caves where they actually hold some small concerts. The music must have sounded amazing.

Rather than listening to beautiful music bouncing off the chamber walls, we had the fortune of listening to children screaming and crying. There were a group of about 14 Americans (with their children) who had a little trouble actually controlling the kids!

Other than the screaming kids, the caves were absolutely spectacular. Hope you can get a little idea of what they were like from these pics!

Here is another link to our friends pics from the Blue Mountains. Click here

Blue Mountains...Take Two (Abseiling Adventure)

One of our friends in Sydney suggested that we do this day canyoning, abseiling, hiking trip in the Blue Mountains. He gave us the number for "High and Wild" Adventures. Chris was beside himself with joy for this venture and signed me, Laura and Scott up for a full day trip. (I have to admit I was pretty excited when I first saw information online about this trip).

Well, we get out to the Blue Mountains, and the weather is nothing but cold, wet, rain and fog... Which as you can imagine got us not so excited about our little day trip. Here's a little taste of the weather:

You've gotta love Chris' enthusiasm... Saturday morning at 8am we head to the High and Wild office to go get all of our gear. It was of course downpouring, but that did not take the smile off of Chris' face! (Neither did this picture)

We spent the morning learning basic skills of abseiling and nearly 2 hours later, we were heading down cliffs of 30m! Check us out!!!

After the above picture was taken I got a little nervouse about abseiling. However, in order to do the canyoning, you HAD to do the higher abseil because at the end of the canyoning, the only way to get out of the canyon was by abseiling down a waterfall.

So, after a nice hearty lunch we began the trek! We put our wetsuits on, got our backpacks ready and we were on our way. Unfortunately we do not have picture of this part of the trip yet since it was raining and didn't want to bring our digitals along. We did however purchase a waterproof camera, so I just need to wait for those pics to be ready. (Note: What I actually mean by that is I need to actually drop the cameras off to get the pics developed!)

The conyoning was absolutely amazing, so I do hope that the pictures came out. We basically went through this canyon with rocks, water, trees and natural waterslides and pools. We basically, swam, walked, jumped and slid through the canyon until we got to the big waterfall where we abseiled...

Not sure how many of you looked at the original video we put up, but if you notice, the water was barely trickling down the waterfall. That's not quite the case when it's been raining for days on end... Needless to say, we had water pouring down on us pretty heavily as we were hanging from ropes 30m in the air. It was not the most enjoyable experience of my life. Not sure if hiking up 1000 stairs after was more enjoyable though?

All in all it was a fantastic adventure. I will certainly be visiting the Blue Mountains again and may even subject myself to another High and Wild adventure!

Happy Easter from the Blue Mountains...

Not so Happy Easter for the Easter Bunny... Chocolate dipped strawberries. yum!

Surfin' Safari...

A couple weeks ago I posted some pics from our surf trip. One of the guys who was on the trip was taking a little break from surfing and stood on shore with his camera in hand.  I just got these pictures in...

I'm very excited that someone caught some pics of me actually standing on the board. I don't know if he's a phenomenal photographer or he just HAPPENED to catch me up on the board, but there I am! I know I don't look like a professional, but here is living proof that I went surfing and actually stood up! Does that make me a surfer chick? Hmmmmm...

I think we're going to contact one of the surf instructors who was on the trip to do a semi-private lesson at one of the beaches in the city (Maroubra). I have to say, surfing is a very relaxing and therapeutic sport.

(I'm about to fall in this pic by the way. Luckily the water was warm!)

I've gotta go pack for our loooong weekend trip to the Blue Mountains. A hiking we will go!

Off to the Blue Mountains we go

Apparently Good Friday in Australia is like Christmas! The city shuts down on Friday, everyone has the day off and we get a 4 day weekend! Wooo hooo!

So, we're headed to the Blue Mountains which is about 2 hours West of Sydney. (See map below)



We are going with our friends Laura and Scott (from Scotland) and leave Sydney on Thursday night. We found this adorable little cottage which is located in Wentworth Falls (a little town in the Blue Mountains). How cute is this cottage?



Anyways, we're pretty much looking to relax, have nice dinners out, do some abseiling (repelling), bushwalking and some caving...

Take a look at this video of the "Empress Waterfall". This will be our Saturday activity...

Empress Waterfall

Buying a car in Sydney? Can you get a good one for cheap? I think so...

In our move to Australia, Chris and I spent a fair amount of time not only AT IKEA, but also countless hours putting together the furniture.** We also had a number of encounters with his fellow classmates at IKEA.

(Thanks Yvonne for sending this along!)

With that said, and with the thoughts of potentially buying a car, I thought this seemed appropriate for our blog!

**Note: I actually had little to no participation in putting the furniture together. I'll give credit where credit is due! If anyone needs Chris to put together IKEA furniture, feel free to call him - he's got a real knack for this stuff!

LOST in Detox...

Chris and I started a detox this past Wednesday. It's a 15-day detox and was actually my Valentine's Day gift! Some may think it was a "shitty" gift, but as many of you know... I absolutely love stuff like this! (Go figure - i'm a true product of my mother!)

Needless to say, we have been going strong for 6 days (almost half way there) and have 7 days left of NO meat, dairy, eggs, flour, processed foods, caffeine, alcohol and sugar. This detox made for quite the exciting weekend. We had a couple of BBQ's we were supposed to go to - but what fun is a BBQ when you can't eat or drink a nice cold one? So instead, Chris and I decided to rent the first season of Lost (Guitar Hero just wasn't going to cut it)!

We walked into the video store on Friday, grabbed the first Season of LOST and went home and began the marathon...

Taking you now to Saturday afternoon. We walked right back into the Video store like we owned the place and grabbed the next 6 videos! We're into Season 2 and we are completely hooked!!!

Wish I had more exciting news to report... We'll be back in action soon. We've got our good friend Rachel visiting from Hong Kong this upcoming weekend and the following week we are headed to the Blue Mountains for our long Easter Weekend!

This blog is almost as suspensful as LOST huh???

Lets go surfin now, Everybodys learning how, Come on and safari with me...

So we're not "Surfin' USA" (incase you were confused by the lyrics in the title of the blog), but we did go surfing about 4 hours north of Sydney in a place called Seal Rocks. The venture began on Friday night where a bus picked us up in the city, we piled on board (all 17 of us), stopped at a Bottle-O** and headed up north!



I wouldn't say that our accomodations were similar at all to the Four Seasons, or even the local Sheraton. Well, unless of course you know of a hotel that has 3 bunkbeds to a room, a shared bathroom and SpaghettiO's® for brekkie**. It felt a little more like overnight camp than anything (I think our bunks at camp were nicer)!

Needless to say, there were certainly advantages to this place:

1. There were kangaroos about 500 meters from our "bunk" - can't really tell from the pics, but we did see them hopping around and actually saw some Wallaby's too!



2. The stop at the Bottle-O** on the way up made for a fun weekend



3. Great Company




4. The excitement of Surfing the next day (please note that the beach we surfed at was phenomenal!)



(Trying again Chris?)



Here we go!!!



Please click here for more pictures from our surfing adventure!!!



Boy were we exhausted by the end of the day... a new post will be coming soon for our "Lawn Bowling" experience... AFTER surfing!



**Please see the dictionary at the bottom of this blog for definitions.