Skenes Creek (This time the overall blog is written by Steve AND Autumn!)

Preface (By Steve)

For as awesome as Melbourne City was, we needed to get out. Our apartment was sucking the life out of us. As the days progressed, you could feel the tension rising between us. It wasn’t until we settled into our “cabin” in Skenes Creek (along the Great Ocean Road) that we felt alive and happy again. In part, this is probably because we’re country mice and thrive in rural expanses, but in this case, we think the Melbourne apartment had bad chi. We’re not terribly spiritual, but it was just so clear in this case. Within hours of our arrival in Skenes, we had already made friends with the resident wild parrots, and the kids were alive in the trampoline. The view towards the ocean and natural lighting had cleared our heads. By contrast, our place in Melbourne was a modern stark cave, decorated with uber testosteroned-up random sports memorabilia, and smelled of mothballs and animal skin rugs. The decor must have been inspired by the Kardashian clan. 

One final thought before it's Autumn's turn. WiFi - a blessing and a curse. This trip would not be possible (or at least would be exceedingly more difficult) without WiFi (aka Internet). We need it. Nicole and I need it to plan and organize, Autumn needs it for school and to stay connected with her friends, and the boys have a morning YouTube ritual that gives us parents a bit of time to get our day going. But I will admit, Skenes was an internet free zone, and we did just fine. We found ourselves playing board games, building puzzles, reading books and sometimes just staring out the window. 

View out the back window towards the ocean

The decor was a kind of funky 70s era motif

Turned out to be a Kids vs Adults game with different questions for each. The kid questions were ridiculously easy, and Nicole and I were flummoxed by the British version of the adult questions. We got crushed.

Autumn was not prepared for this picture. She doesn't typically look like this....

No, we did not grow so bored as to watch the fire burn... This was a ceremonial burning of Bryce's second grade math workbook. On to 3rd grade for him!

Bryce's morning writing assignment

The Main Course (by Autumn)

Our house in Skenes Creek was overall pretty fun. The lack of WiFi was “eh”, but otherwise I enjoyed it. On our first day there, we saw a small box of bird seed in the laundry room. Previously in Melbourne we had seen a flock of cockatoos on the grass at a park, so I wondered if there were cockatoos in Skenes Creek as well. It turns out I was right, along with King Parrots, Kookaburras, Crows, and parrot-like birds with blue chins that we called the Bluchins. Our AirBnB host, Bo, texted later that day that they feed the parrots out of their own hands. We had already filled the feeding plate on the deck with seed, so we had to go out and get some more. The parrots were feeding on the plate on the deck, and we wanted to try out feeding them out of our hands, so I grabbed a handful of seed, flattened my hand and slowly walked towards the birds. They were timid at first, but once they got used to us they were climbing all over!

I went a bit overboard when my dad let me use his camera. Go ahead and scroll right down to my next bit of writing if you get bored of my pictures. I sat out on the deck for a few hours at a time looking at the birds, feeding the birds, and taking pictures of them.

 Zane was a bit scared of the birds...I have no idea why

Pleepleus found another friend.

 

Bryce LOVED having the birds eat from his hand.

 I like this picture because it shows that this amazing bird was just sitting on a completely domestic item; a clothesline.

I caught it catching a worm!

 We're not sure what this bird is, but my mom loved it anyway!

 The cockatoos use their claws to eat the corn mixed in with the seeds.

Does anyone know why this cockatoo has a different colored mohawk?

This cockatoo was trying to scare away the crow. In the end, he failed and the crow got to grab a few bits of seed before Bryce scared it away.

We named some of the birds. This one's name is Speckles.

This bird was on Dad's back!

My mom got this shot...Good job, Mom!

 This bird seemed to be a mix of the King Parrots and the bluechin birds...

 My dad named this bird Crimson Yellow

 The King Parrots and the bluechins shared the food.

So did all the cockatoos.

We figured out that there is a kind of hierarchy among the birds. The crows are the mean ones, always scaring the other birds away. The cockatoos and crows are on about the same high level, but the cockatoos are nicer to the other birds. The parrots are a level lower than the cockatoos, and only they would eat out of our hands and land on us. I was patient one time with a cockatoo, and it grabbed a few seeds from me, but no one else could seem to have to patience to feed them. The little sparrows and the blue chin birds were quite skittish and probably the lowest in the hierarchy. 

 The feeding became daily in the morning and right before dinner. One time we were eating dinner and we hadn't fed the birds yet and one of them came up to the kitchen window as if to say, “hey, hey you, yeah you, I'm hungry, come feed me!”

On the first full day, November 10:
We took a hike to Shelly beach, a beach full of shells. Along the way we saw koalas in the wild! They weren't really doing anything different than they do in a zoo, which was curling into a big fuzzy ball and sleeping in a eucalyptus tree. The main difference was the backdrop; in a zoo, it's metal. In the wild, it's trees. Another difference is their being territorial. In the wild, you'll only see one or two at a time, but in the zoos they have more together. The hike was under the eucalyptus trees and when we got closer to the sea, ferns and pine trees. The beach we walked onto from the trail through the forest did not have many shells. We decided that it couldn't have been Shelly beach, so we hiked along the tide pools, occasionally looking in them to find these cool starfish:

 Three beaches over, with me in the lead, I came upon a beach entirely made of shells. I thought, Hey, this sure seems to have a lot of shells on it. I think I found Shelly beach. We ate lunch there and then looked at shells. I'm pretty sure Bryce was in heaven.

 These were taken on our walk to the beach

On the second day, November 11, 

We went to the 12 apostles of Australia. There's actually only 8, but the marketing people named it 12.

This was a beach near the apostles where apparently survivors of a shipwreck swam in to safety.

On our walk around the apostles, we saw an echidna cross the road! (Do you know what a baby echidna is called? Guess. You'll never get it. It's glorious. (queue Macklemore's "Glorious") I'll tell you at the end of the blog. (Hint: It's also a mixed dog breed as well as the name for a baby platypus too)

 We watched the sun go down over the apostles.

 On our way home from the apostles, we stopped to look at some glow worms. You may or may not be able to see them in the picture, but it looked like stars on the forest floor.

On November 12

We went ziplining in the Otway forest. (Well, Dad, Zane, and I did. Bryce was too small, so he and my mom went on a treetop walk to a 47 meter (155 feet) high platform in the trees.) It was fun, and we met some nice travelers from Arkansas who we talked with during our zipping through the forest. (Hi guys!)

After the ziplining, we hiked to a triple waterfall nearby. It was nice, but still nothing compared to Iceland. 

We got home mid-afternoon, so while the boys played on the trampoline, my dad and I decided to go to a cafe in town to get some WiFi for my school and for him to finish the previous blog post. He was SUPPOSED to check on the house in Sydney and check in for our flight, but he forgot. My schooling is a bit stressful when I don't have WiFi. I have to get a lot of it done before we go out of WiFi, which is stressful because I have to get double the amount of work done and still go out on adventures with my family, keep up with my friends, read, take care of myself, and blog/journal.

I have one final closing note:

A BABY ECHIDNA IS CALLED A PUGGLE. A PUGGLE!!!!!

G'day,
Autumn

Closing Thoughts, (by Steve)

November 13: Koalas and Airports
Fortunately our flight to Sydney was not until mid afternoon, which gave us an opportunity for another round of Koala spotting. Apparently they are finicky when it comes to Eucalyptus (called gum trees here) and only dine on 2 of the 60 different types (frankly, I thought there was only one kind of Eucalyptus, the invasive kind that we Americans frown upon). This means they tend to concentrate themselves in small areas, which allows for decent Koala spotting, but also means they are becoming endangered (Nooooooo!!!!!!). If asked to describe the behavior of a Koala, most would talk about how they just curl up into fuzzy little balls and sleep the day away; occasionally stirring to munch on some leaves and scratch their ears. That's pretty much what I would have said too, until we saw this...

https://youtu.be/TgIWxq6JDFk

I will never look at a Koala the same again.

Over the past five months, we have pass thru 21 different airports. Most are exactly as you would expect and are not worth mentioning. However, our flight from Melbourne to Sydney was not from the International Airport, but rather from Avalon, an airport about 45 minutes outside of Melbourne. I was expecting an Oakland airport kind of thing. Avalon is officially my favorite airport on the planet. Imagine if you will, they converted a Target store in the middle of nowhere surrounded by wheat fields, into two large open spaces divided by a single security screening booth. The rental car return was quite literally across a two lane road from the entry. But what was truly striking about this airport...it served only one airline, Jetstar. It would be the equivalent of Southwest thumbing their nose at OAK, SFO, and SJO, and building their own airport in Tracy. My only gripe.... their wifi wasn't working....