Newcastle to Port Macquarie

We had an absolutely fantastic time with my relatives in Newcastle! It was very sad to have to leave them after only a couple of days. It was also very weird to be visiting them. I still can't quite get my head around being so far away from home.

We got a great tour of Newcastle on the first day. There's plenty of nice beaches in the area and Nina pointed out all of the popular wedding spots along the way :) The next day we spent at the vineyards that are about an hour and a half outside of town. It's a beautiful area full of vineyards. I'm sure you can easily spend an entire weekend sampling all of the wine. We tried some very nice wine and had a lovely picnic.

The next day they took us to the BlackButt reserve. This isn't too far from where they live and the reserve has koala bears, wombats and wallabies. The wombats were very active and cute. I was ready to take them home. You can get very close to the koalas in the reserve, but again you can't touch them. Nina and Michael had to drag me out of there as I was facinated with the animals. We were on our way to Port Stephens which is about an hour and a half north of Newcastle. This is a bay of water that is known for having a pod of dolphins that live there. We headed out on a dolphin watch cruise and hoped for the best. And boy we got a show!!! There were so many dolphins we couldn't even count. It was fantastic. We got very close as well, although I still couldn't manage to reach out and touch them. Some came right up under the front of the boat and they were riding our wake for a bit. Really, really neat.

The last night in Newcastle we got everyone together for a BBQ and had a great time. We prepared our now world famous Korean BBQ ribs for everyone and every single piece went! There were even requests for the recipe. We will just have to come back to see everyone again.

We moved on from Newcastle to the town of Port Macquarie. This is one town where Mark had gotten a job offer. We thought we'd check it out to see what we were missing. It would have definitely been a cool place to hang out for 6 months. Plenty of beaches and a cute town. It's too bad it didn't work out, but maybe in the future.

We are spending the next few days heading up to Brisbane and then are heading out to Darwin on the 9th of April. Darwin will be our last stop in Australia and then the Asia portion of our trip begins. I think we are in for a big shock. We've had it very easy so far in terms of being in an English speaking country. We also just checked the weather for Thailand. The high there is 36 Celsius and the low is 29 Celsius! That's just insane. Should be quite the adventure.

Pictures for Port Macquarie to Brisbane:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/nicoleella10/album?.dir=3fca&.src=ph&store=&prodid=&.done=http%3a//pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/nicoleella10/my_photos