Trip to Australia – March 3-21, 2001

As Thursday the 15th was my birthday, we decided to celebrate by catching some rays at the famous Bondi Beach. Here's the first thing you see when you get off the bus.

Snookums catches some rays and reads his book.

Here's the view down the beach as seen from my towel. Bondi's the most famous tourist beach, but it actually wasn't too crowded. And luckily the waves were pretty flat, which meant yours truly didn't squeal like a baby when they knocked her over.

After I finished sunburning myself, we headed to the Royal Botanic Gardens to catch a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It was a lovely birthday.

Friday we decided to see yet another zoo - the Taronga Zoo in Sydney. Here's yet another overexposed silhouette of us as taken by some dopey tourist. I'll never learn.

One neat section of the zoo was a walk-through area with lots of kangaroos. It was a hot day though, and most of them were just lying in the shade like this one.

I happened to glance down over this low wall and saw two little porcupine-lookin' things snufflin' along the ground in front of me. Snookums ran over astonished. Echidnas, he says, are hardly ever seen so active during the daytime. These ones were just walkin' around, looking for food. They looked kind of cute, except for the prickly part.