Erik and Erin in Australia

I've been staying with my parents in Lac La Biche for the last little while, but I'm going into Edmonton Tomorrow. Erin is already in Edmonton, as I am sure most of you already know.

I've used my parent's scanner to throw together a small set of photos that I didn't post earlier due to the cost of scanning things in an internet cafe. You can see a full sized version of any of these images by clicking on them. I've also created a couple of collections: signs, and rocks.

Erik

This is a last minute update from Australia. Erin and I recently discovered that we have to fly out tonight instead of tomorrow night. This was a bit of a shock, but because of the shorter lay overs we will be home a lot sooner. We are now scheduled to arrive in Edmonton at 7:15pm on the 30th.

For the loyal readers of this page, I will post a bunch more pictures once I get home. It's time for me to go to the airport, so this is my final update from Australia. Thanks for reading. I'll see you soon.

Erin and I are currently enjoying our last few days in Austraila. We are in Canberra, the nation's capital. It is a very scenic place, and it is providing some entertainment for the end of our trip.

We fly out from Melbourne on the 30th, and we are due to arive home in Edmonton at 8:29pm on November 1st. I estimate that we are going to be in transit for a nightmarish 78 hours. And we thought that the trip over here was bad. This is what we get for buying cheap plane tickets.

I'm looking forward to going home, but at the same time it will be sad to leave Australia. The countdown is on, only eleven days until we leave Australia. See you soon everyone!

Erin is currently traveling between Sydney and Melbourne. I am still in Sydney, but I will be leaving here soon to catch up to Erin before we fly home from Melbourne. It will be good to see one last bit of the country before leaving.

I have scanned a few more pictures for everyone to take a look at.

You probably can't read the sign that Erin is standing beside, but it is pretty funny. It is covered in Asian writing. At the bottom it says in English "This sign is to prevent foreign tourists from getting lost." We found this sign on a walking track in the Blue Mountains. If you walk about 10 minutes from the base of the scenic railway, you encounter these signs. Apparently as an English speaking foreign tourist I'm not at the same risk of getting lost in the bush.

Last weekend I rented a car with some people from the hostel. We drove to a town named Parkes, 400km inland from Sydney. Unfortunately, Erin didn't come along on this trip, but she was having fun on a farm that she was staying at. The main motivation for going to Parkes was to just get out of the city and see something different. Parkes is the home of a giant radio telescope, and it is featured in the movie The Dish. We drove out, we visited some wineries, we stayed in an old hotel straight out of The Shinning, we saw the dish, and we drove back. All in all a pretty good weekend.

Here is a picture of Dave, Mike, and I crammed into the back seat of our rental car. We actually had enough leg room, but our shoulders were too wide, so we couldn't sit back. The three of us shoulder to shoulder were wider than the car. Thankfully we only rode like this for about twenty minutes.

Here is the dish that we drove out to see. It is a 64 meter radio telescope, and it is used for radio astronomy. It was used during the Apollo 11 mission to receive the television signals that were shown during the first moon landing. As well, the seti@home project is planning to start a new project analyzing data gathered from this radio telescope. Yes, I know, I am a big geek.

The comments page was getting pretty full, so I decided to archive the old comments. They can be found here. Once again, thank you everyone who has left messages, Erin and I love to read them.