Sunday, December 21, 2008

The Best Chirstmas Present Ever!

This year we decided not to buy anything for each other for Christmas. We just made a really big move and are trying to get things set up here. Plus, our goal with coming here is to travel and see as much as we can. We also don't want to accumulate a lot of crap that we just have to move back to the US in a few years. So we started our adventures of exploring where we live this weekend. We went to the Symbio Wildlife Park in Helensburg, about a half an hour south of us. When we got there it was a lot smaller than what we expected, but it was an amazing experience. It was more like a petting zoo than a wildlife preserve.
You could feed, pet, and interact with a lot of the animals.


My whole life I have wanted to pet a koala bear. I remember in elementary school my hopes were dashed by a guest speaker who told me koala bears were mean and it was illegal to touch them (both of which are true). In spite of these facts my dream came true this weekend. The park does koala bear demonstrations twice a day and we made sure to be there for one of them. We were the first people there in fact. While we were waiting we watched the koala bears in their enclosure. Most of them were actually awake (they sleep 22 hours a day, so that's rare to see). There were 2 males that were fighting over territory and koala bears can be really scary. They make a loud growling noise that does sound like they could be bears (they're actually marsupials). So we got really lucky because the guy doing the demonstration had to get a baby koala out instead since the males were fighting and being aggressive. He told us all about koala bears and then let us line up to pet it and take pictures with him. Annabelle loved its soft fur. It really was a dream come true and sharing it with Dave and Annabelle made it so much more wonderful!
Afterwards we went to the Kangaroo and wallabee section. We were given a free bag of kangaroo food when we got there and wanted to go feed them. They hop right up to you so you can feed them. The kangaroos are behind a fence, but the wallabees come right out to you. One really liked Annabelle and even explored her stroller (it made me a little nervous, but it was fine). We even got to see a baby wallabee and a baby kangaroo. I really couldn't have asked for a better Christmas present! What a great Australian experience. It will be really hard to top next Christmas =).

4 comments:

  1. YES, you have a blog!! I knew that you would start one sooner or later!! It looks like Australia is pretty awesome! We miss you guys!! Have a good Christmas! Our blog is devandlizpalmerfamily.blogspot.com

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  2. So cool! I'm glad you had a good Christmas and hope you are getting settled into motherhood and Aussie-hood! And I'm so glad you have a blog!

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  3. That is a good christmas present. Sounds like you guys are having fun.

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  4. We miss you at West Hills! Isn't being a Mother wonderful. What an adventure.

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