Busy Day!



We had a very busy day today!  We drove up to the city of Penguin and saw the "Big Penguin" above, then drove to Burnie and picked up Leigh's race number for tomorrow's 10K. 

Our next stop was Wynyard for the tulip festival.



 The best spot of the day was Fern Glade in Burnie, a park along the Emu River.  It's a beautiful spot with huge tree ferns and gum trees along the river.  We even saw the elusive platypus!

We also made stops at Table Cape and Fossil Bluff for great ocean views of Bass Strait.  We had a crazy chinese dinner in Burnie tonight and then saw Fairy Penguins returning to their burrows.  We'll be posting more this weekend, so stay tuned!

Peacocks and Pademelons

We had a great walk through Cataract Gorge today.  We tried a new trail, the Zig Zag Trail, which was very steep to start then gradually descended.

We also saw a pademelon.  This is a marsupial similar to a wallaby and about the size of a small dog.

The resident peacocks must have been in a good mood (it is springtime), several males were displaying.

Bloomin' Backyard

In some parts of Australia, the Calla lily has become naturalized and is considered a weed and pest.  These look pretty good!

TechnoChef

Leigh's making gnocchi for dinner tonight.  She's a truly modern woman, check out the computer for recipes!  You can't argue with the results:

Sticky Date Pudding

So last night I was much more successful with dessert than I was with the chocolate chip cookies.  Sticky date pudding seems to be a popular dessert here and I wanted to give it a try.  I made it using this recipe with a few modifications.  I used pecans instead of walnuts, didn't make the praline, didn't put the brandy in the sauce, and I baked it in a large baking dish instead of individual ramekins because I didn't have them.  The results were great!



I think the best part was the butterscotch sauce.  We can't wait to eat more of it tonight!

Not the same chocolate chip cookies and Coke is expensive

So Ben and I wanted chocolate chip cookies tonight and when we bought the chocolate chips I thought I would use the recipe on the back of the bag instead of the traditional Nestle Toll House recipe that I usually use.  The recipe only used flour, sugar, butter, baking powder, sweetened condensed milk, and chocolate chips-no eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, or salt.  Well, I will be using the traditional recipe next time.  The batter was really dry and the cookies weren't nearly as good.  It was worth a try though.  We also broke down at the store and bought Coke and Diet Coke.  We always kept Coke and Diet Coke stocked at our place in Chicago, but it is so expensive here so we had only been getting it for a treat.  I figured out it was more expensive to buy one soda a week for each of us than to just buy a 24 pack of each at the store, but it was still $29 total for the two 24 packs!  We've found that groceries in general are more expensive here and we aren't sure why.  That's all for now.

Time and the Footy

Australian Rules Football (colloquially known as "Footy") finally wrapped up its season yesterday.  They tried to finish the season with the Grand Final last week.  Last week Collingwood and St. Kilda clashed ending in a 68-68 draw after a dramatic second-half comeback by St. Kilda.  Instead of overtime, the AFL has the ingenious plan of replaying the Final the following week.  This way, the league gets another week of publicity and another week of ticket/food/beer/souvenir sales (100,000 people at the MCG).  By the way, you also get another week of drunken Aussies going to the emergency department!  This weekend, Collingwood crushed St. Kilda 108-52.

In other news, we learned that Australia also observes Daylight Savings Time and last night was 'spring forward.'  Luckily, we learned this before my morning shift today!  We're now 15 hours ahead of the Eastern U.S. and 16 hours in the future for the U.S. central time zone.