Sedate and suburban....

I LOVE to explore new places!!!

I am convinced there is nomad blood pounding through my suburban veins.

A piece of me that is not entirely happy unless it's going somewhere it's never been before.

Unfortunately, one cannot continue to explore new places constantly, as one's finances will not allow this kind of lifestyle.....

Sigh.

(Why oh why, am I not independently wealthy?)

Anyway, if you can't actually go exploring and are currently in a very suburban loungeroom - you hash back over the places you have been, and as there is a huge gap in my blogging patterns this year, I may as well write about where we've been this past few months.

Two birds with one stone so to speak.

Hmm.....

So we kissed Hervey Bay goodbye at the end of July.

My, that was hard. Leaving behind a life and friends that we loved dearly.

But we had our minds set that the best thing for us as a family was to return home and be with family again. We had already been gone 13 years.

So after a series of near misses and miracles (mostly involving our moving truck that somehow got completely confused as to where they were picking up and then moving our furniture to and from???!!!!!), we headed off into the great unknown.....

Well, just up the road to Emu Park, just south of Yeppoon, where we stayed for three nights.

It rained.

The entire time.

Except for when we went walking on the beach one afternoon.....

From behind insiduously dark and laden clouds, the sun burst forth and kissed the beach with a golden glow, turning soldier crab diggings into natures' fireworks...... 

From here we headed west. To the outback. I was very excited about this. I couldn't wait for the children to see the great expanses of nothing, to see what life is like away from the beautiful tropical coast.

We went through some classic outback towns, with fantastic pubs and beautiful main streets.....

We had planned lots of adventures while in the outback - fossicking for sapphires at Rubyvale

(we found eight little beauties - not big enough to have cut into jewellery though dammit!) and fossicking for dinosaur bones at the Australian Age of Dinosaur Museum (we held a real bone of Banjo the Australovenator, a newly discovered carnivore - it was very, very cool!)

We visited and explored thoroughly the Australian Mining Museum, the QANTAS museum, Waltzing Matilda museum, The Stockmans Hall of Fame, School of the Air tour, Flying Doctors tour etc etc.

The local wildlife was just as curious of us, as we were of them...

We needed so much more time to see everything properly so we plan to go back again in about five years when the Australian Age of Dinosaur Museum in Winton, holds their three weeks of fossil digging in the black plains surrounding the museum - woohoo!!!

(TO BE CONTINUED - STUPID COMPUTER WON'T LOAD ANY MORE PHOTOS!!!)