Merry Christmas!

There's something about the routine of family holidays that make us feel like we weren't off on the other side of the world for two Christmases. Big dinners, plenty of drinks, chitchat with family members, lots of cookies... somehow Xmas this year was the same as always.

Breaking with routine wasn't terrible: celebrating Xmas while hiding from the Australian heat in an air-conditioned cabin-style hotel room (and in the pool) last year was quite the experience. Sharing big dinners with an international crowd (while avoiding the heat again in the a/c) in Melbourne the year before that was another memorable way to spend the holiday. It's was always a bit weird to spend Christmas in summertime, but it was nice to not have to wear sweaters and slippers! It was fun to call home on Christmas while on the road... but now the funerary jokes about us "being in a better place" and "it's too bad they can't be with us this Christmas" will have to stop. :)

There were some new additions to our families since we left-- a few tiny nieces (Adrian's family), a wiener dog 'nephew' (who dressed up festively as a reindeer for Dayle's family) who made things a little more interesting. The snow has mostly kept away (great, in our opinions!). Sadly, Dayle's favourite holiday ice cream-- PC Candy Cane Fudge Crackle, yum!-- seems to be missing from all of the Zehrs & No Frills stores she's been hunting for it at. Yarrr! And after years of daydreaming about it too...

Hope everyone had a merry Christmas... it was great catching up with everyone, and thanks for all the great loot! All the best to you guys in the new year. xoxo, d&a

Introducing... our fridge

Today we thought it would be fun to feature the most-decorated part of our new apartment: the refrigerator!

The fridge itself isn't anything special-- in fact, it's missing a shelf and it's only now beginning to collect some vegetables and a few necessary condiments. But in this case, it's what's on the outside that counts.

Somewhere along the way in Australia, we began collecting a fridge magnet or two from our temporary hometowns and some of the more memorable stops along the way. We accumulated a few more during our jaunt over to Hong Kong and Taiwan. And once we hit the road with Daisy (our van), our magnet collection just grew and grew. Luckily the inside of Daisy had a lot of metal panels above the doors-- plenty of room to display our budding collection.

Turned out there was no shortage of souvenir magnets in Oz-- even the tiniest towns, like Hawker, at the base of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, with a population of 300 people was selling fridge magnets. So was William Creek, SA-- population 6. Any town with the slightest claim to fame sold magnets-- like Wycliffe Well, NT, home to many UFO sightings, or Goulburn, NSW, which had a giant merino sheep to lure in tourists. We bought a boomerang magnet from Broome, WA, a large plastic banana from The Big Banana in Coffs Harbour, NSW, and more still. Kitsch is alive and well on the highways of Australia and we're not at all embarrassed to have bought into it. We even continued collecting during our journey through Southeast Asia, though we had to be a bit more choosy when lugging our souvenirs around in our backpacks. Still, we found ourselves a tin boat from Vietnam, ceremonial dance masks from Bali, a tuk-tuk from Thailand. It was only Burma that didn't have a souvenir magnet industry... yet.

And while we may or may not have spent a small fortune shipping all of our magnetic goodies home, it was worth it. We consider it a form of visual diary to our adventures-- one that we get to review every time we go for the milk.