Happy Canada Day

Happy Canada Day!
We started the celebrating on Friday night with a little party… complete with red-and-white streamers (we’re keeping them up permanently), some Canadian Club rye, and Canada flag tattoos. We don’t get any fireworks, or a long weekend, and it’s just about the chilliest Canada Day we’ve had yet, but there was a fabulous full moon (a blue moon, meaning the 2nd full moon in a month!) to enjoy from the beach. Hope you’re all up at cottages/boats enjoying the 30-degree weather, eh!

Things we’re excited about these days:
* Kangaroo meat: Adrian tried his first kangaroo steak last night, and he loved it! Check out the video, which we’ve posted online (from Our Videos link). He is definitely our food guinea pig for the trip.
* Champagne: Dayle’s fallen in love with what they call “champagne” in Australia. It’s probably not even the real stuff, or the fanciest stuff (we’ve heard it’s really just sparkling wine), but people here drink it on every occasion they can. We got some free from our former housekeeping gig, and sipped it at a lovely beachside picnic yesterday. Yum!
* The newsagency: Oz has them everywhere and it’s the place to buy newspapers, magazines, souvenirs, greeting cards, lotto tickets, and stationery items (possibly replacing the convenience store, at least in Port Douglas?). Adrian gets his Web Designer magazine there every month, and Dayle has discovered a fantastic Aussie magazine called Frankie. They even had Adbusters there yesterday! We’re going to have quite the traveling library in our van.
* Contests: Since making the Finalists list in the Lonely Planet video competition, we’ve entered some of our trip photos into Verge magazine’s (a Toronto-based travel mag) photo contest. We’ll see how that goes! This photo below is one of our entries.

* Getting a van: It’s getting ever closer. The road trip to top all road trips is coming… we still have about a month left of work in Port Douglas, but we’ve had a couple of close ones where we nearly put down the cash for a sweet set of wheels. We’re almost ready to commit… the trip plan at present is to do Queensland really in-depth, from top to bottom and inland a bit to the Outback; surfing, snorkeling, camping, sailing, and fossicking for gems… we’ll eventually land in Brisbane and plan to stay there for a bit if we’re into it. But if we still have heaps of money and are “over” Queensland, we’ve talked about heading to the big red centre and checking out Uluru before coming back to the coast. So many possibilities!