After three fun but too-short days in Adelaide, it was off to Brisbane to meet up with my friend Oliver.

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After a couple of very fun weeks with the family in Belgrave, I headed off to Adelaide to visit my friends Aurelia and Brian, and their 18mo old son Orlando. I used to work with Aurelia at Reed, but a couple years after I moved to the Bay Area, they moved back to Aurelia's home town of Brighton (or as Brian calls it, Bri-Town :-) ) a beach suburb just south of Adelaide.

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I've had all the photos from my trip to Australia posted for a while, but of course the holidays have been upon us and I suck at keeping this thing up to date - so I'm finally announcing it.  You'll find them at http://notlost.org/gallery/v/chris/travels/Oz08/ where there's one album for each city I visited.

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The Healesville Sanctuary is a branch of the Melbourne Zoo, out in the hills to the east. There one can find plenty of Australian fauna and flora without having to head out into the bush to find it. We headed up there on Sunday of my first weekend in Belgrave, a week after I'd arrived in Australia. I've got a decent selection of photos from there in the gallery, so have a look. The highlight of that day would have to have been one of the snakes that we saw.

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My time in Belgrave has included two full weekends, and some of the family activities I've been partaking in have included a trip to the Healesville Sanctuary (more on that later), an couple of visits to local parks, and a morning at Grant's Picnic Ground, just a half-mile or so up the road.

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G'day again from down undah! Yes indeed I've been in Australia for 15 days now, mostly here in Belgrave, about 25 miles east of downtown Melbourne at the end of one of the public-transit train lines.  I've been visiting Larkin, one of my sisters from my New Zealand host-family of 25 yrs ago, and her partner Andrea, and their three-year-old twins Finn & Poppy.

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Well, hello there, from here, which is far away.

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Finally I'm taking time at the coffee shop this morning to add another day or two to the DisneyWorld saga.

So after two days at the Magic Kingdom, we decided to spend friday at the Animal Kingdom, the newest theme park at Disney World. I think of all the surprisingly cool, and even impressive things I experienced this week, the Animal Kingdom park was high on the list.

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A couple things about the Magic Kingdom, one up, one down: On the upside: even though its clear that there's subtle marketing going on everywhere, and things are arranged to help you spend more money, I never found that aspect to be overwhelming and annoying. Yes, I saw it, but it wasn't glaring or obnoxious, and it was easy to ignore it. The shops and the street vendors all blended into the surroundings pretty smoothly. All this was another reason why the whole week was much better than I'd feared.  

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For those who're familiar with Disneyland in California, the equivalent at Disney World is the Magic Kingdom, which is very similar, but bigger. It has a main street lined with 'in-character' shops, leading to a circle in front of Cinderella's Castle. Around the circle are the various "lands" - Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland. Each land can take half a day or more to explore. We started in Adventureland, where we wandered throught the Swiss Family Robinson's treehouse.

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