Hello Everyone!

Since it's been about 2 weeks since my last entry, and I have heaps to tell, these next sections are going to happen over the next couple days when we are in Mackay at the Staines house. I think the best way of doing this will be to report what happened on a day to day basis...

June 30th: My arrival day in to Sydney at about 10am. I caught the train into the city and met up with the family at their hotel. I was blown away by the height of Quinn and his voice - it was so deep! He's grown heaps and what a difference 6 months can make! After some quick shopping, and a quick lunch, the entire family went to the base of the Harbour Bridge for the Bridge climb. Having done this on my last trip to Sydney, I knew what I was in for and completely pumped, but the rest of the fam (mainly Dad) were a little nervous. After the hour briefing, getting suited up and all our test runs done, we head out onto the bridge. At first, Dad was really nervous, but managed to overcome his fear of heights and enjoy the scenic view from the top (at a height of 134m nonetheless!) and have fun with some photos. That evening, we enjoyed a fabulous italian meal at a restaurant recommended to us by one of Dad's work partners. We had great service the entire night after some easy name dropping!!

July 1st: Happy Canada Day! This was probably the most eventful and unique Canada Day I've spent ever. Kelsey, a friend of mine, met up with us at the Sydney Airport to fly directly into Uluru. Upon arrival into this little airport, we caught the shuttle bus into our resort area. Arriving into the airport was great fun - we managed to get seats all together in the exit row and tried our best not to scream when we saw Uluru from the sky. It's easily the largest geographical figure in sight. After a quick tour around our resort - a 5 star hotel complex with multiple sites, a shuttle bus in between and amazing viewpoints, we walked across the complex to hit up the supermarket for some much needed chocolate and the bottle shop for some beer. Along the way, we stopped at one of the lookouts to get a good view of the rock, and decided to visit another lookout onto Uluru during sunset that evening.

During sunset, we took some amazing photos of the family in front of the rock, as well as posing with the Canadian flag for good times' sake and then hiked back to the resort for dinner. The only downside to the day was realizing at supper that the rock had been open for climbing that day, and since this is a rare occurrence, we totally thought we had missed out on an amazing opportunity...

July 2nd: But we didn't. The next day after a scrumptious buffet breakfast, we managed to steal a bunch of food, pack it into packs and caught the shuttle bus to the base of Uluru. Today was one of only a handful of days which the rock was open. Of course, we couldn't pass up an opportunity to climb this iconic figure, so that's what we did. Start time: 10:45am. Summit reached: 12:30pm. Descent started at 1:00pm. End time: 1:30pm. The climb up the rock was spectacular. Everything from the views, the difficulties,the great weather, just knowing mum did the exact same thing years prior....it was awesome. Probably the highlight of my entire trip to Australia!! Of course, Kelsey and I lugged our lunch up this massive rock so we enjoyed a picnic lunch at the summit, followed by some great family shots!!

That evening, we ended off a great day with a sunset camel tour. Epic!!!