tuesday wednesday

This whole week flew by pretty fast even though we covered a lot of ground and accomplished more than we expected. Monday morning Jason Kauffman carted us to Brisbane Airport and we were so distracting that he missed his exit. Thanks to his faithful GPS we got there. On time. We flew to Sydney and ,with a connecting flight, to Albury in New South Wales. It was a two prop tin lizzy over the Great Dividing Range and in an hour and twenty minutes we landed in Albury at an airport about the size of Smoketown.

We had made reservations to rent a car, but daddy had lost his credit card *clears throat* and they wouldn't take just the credit card number. They needed the physical card... and no, they wouldn't take cash either. Great. Just Great. Ok, so after renting a motel room for the night, we gained access to wireless Internet. Then, following one of his brilliant ideas, daddy created a company letterhead signed by the "owner" of the business and used that to authorize the credit card number.

We were feeling jovial, so we walked to a local shop and nibbled pizza and sipped soda. The black and white squares that chequered the floor and the music and Hollywood memorabilia decorating the walls and ceiling made you feel like it was the 1960s all over again.

Tuesday morning we drove seven hours touring the country. In the meantime, we saw these cockatoos or w/e they are. I think they're almost like starlings or sparrows or something because there are so many of them. So after swerving to and fro trying to please the lady inside the GPS thingy (while staying on the left side of the road) we ended up at Rhonda and Bill Daly's four thousand acre farm. We had a wonderful supper of steak and potatoes and salad and uh water. The next couple pictures are obviously landscapes... it's what it looks like in that part of the country.









On Wednesday we visited their son James' farm. He keeps racing horses for the Arab Emirates. These are some of the yearlings.
These horses are some of the mares he is holding that are worth anywhere from $50,000 to $1 million.

This is a picture of the wheat fields and vineyards in the background. I think I was either bored or extremely interested, or maybe I was doing some kind of Mennonite yoga. I'm not an anthropologist, linguist, or social psychologist; neither do I have a masters metaphysics so I can't really tell what's happening in this photo. I mean "who can know the intents of the heart?"