Our Great Adventure

This weekend Matt had Friday and ALL day Saturday off! Whenever he has time off we always try to take advantage of it and go somewhere fun. 

Friday night we just wanted to get out of the house so we packed a little sack dinner and went down to the beach. It had been a warm day and it turned into the perfect evening. Not too windy and a comfy temperature. We spent about an hour and a half just relaxing and watching people skim board and play in the sand. I think those were the best PB & J's I ever had.

Today for our big adventure we decided to go to Maru Koala Animal Park and Phillip Island. The animal park was about 30 minutes away and had a bunch of neat Australian animals. It had kangaroos, wombats, koalas, tasmanian devils, wallabies, peacocks, emus, alpacas, sheep, dingos, a crocodile, turtles, and all types of birds. We even got to hand feed the kangaroos. I had done this before but I don't remember it being so scary! Matt and I were the only people in the whole pen with about 30 roos and they swarmed us! They would come over and pull down on our arms and hands trying to get to the food. One even left big scratches on my arm!! Other than that they were fun, and really cute. One had a little baby in it's pouch. It was fun watching them bounce all over.

                                      

After the animal park we drove about another 20 minutes to Phillip Island where we went to a beautiful beach. It is one of the best surfing beaches in Australia, but I think only stupid people would try to swim in these waves, they were huge!! The beach was really pretty though, it had natural dunes, sand cliffs, and some big rock formations. It was pretty windy though so we didn't stay long. Phillip Island has a lot of other things to do but we are going to wait until Matt's parents come visit next month to do them all.

                                      

It was such a nice day. We love getting to see new things especially things like Woolamai Beach that show the awesome power of God, it is amazing to see what he can create.

Tomorrow we get to go to church for the first time here with a man from Matt's team and his family. We are really excited to get to fellowship here and hopefully get to know them better. It will be a great ending to an already great weekend.

So I just finished week one with Bruce.  Bruce is well known through Australia. He has trained LOTS of the top Australia athletes. Most well known to me are Andrew Bogut and Patrick Mills.  I am with him in the weight room 5 days a week and it was the hardest 5 days of lifting I have ever been through.  I am really excited to see how much my game with change with all the strength I will gain working with him over the next 7 months.
Not much change on the basketball side of things, we are getting ready for our first preseason game BUT I don't know if I will play in that or not.  I am still waiting on my Visa to come thru and I can't get my FIBA players license until that has come in.  HOPEFULLY it will come next week sometime!
Not much new news from down under......lots of basketball and lots of beach time. Its a rough life!!!!

We have seen so many pretty things while we have been here. There are some amazing birds and flowers especially. The following are some pictures I took in our backyard:

So this weekend was the official start of the 2010 Nunawading Spectres season.  It is a season with VERY high hopes for the club.  The Nunawading club has more history than probably any other clubs in Australia combined. This years team has a lot of new guys, so the first week was a lot of team building and just getting to know each other.  We went to training camp this weekend and they took the "camp" part very literal.  We slept in tents on the beach, had a morning sessions of beach workouts and afternoon sessions of on court work.  I knew things were going to be good here but so far everything has exceeded expectations.  I haven't been part in a program that pushes "team" to the extent that it is pushed here EVER in my basketball career. We have a man on staff whose only role is to work on communication, giving and receiving feedback and also did a lot with us setting the team goals for the year.  His only job is to keep the team growing together and it is very neat to see how he does it.  It is a first for me but I have really enjoyed it so far.  Our first game is 3 weeks away and it is against the defending champs and our crosstown rival so the season will hopefully start out with us getting a HUGE win!

More to come soon.......

Well...here it goes! For New Years we made about 1000 resolutions (or so it seems) and one of them happened to be starting a blog. I realize it is a little past new years, but there isn't too much to write about when you are just hang in out in De Queen all day. So, now we are finally in Australia, starting a new chapter in our lives which I guess means time to blog!

We left the States on February 14th (our five years together anniversary) and 30 hours later we were finally in Carrum Downs, Australia, our new home until sometime in September. Andi did great on the flight, but the day after we got here she was super fussy. I think she was too tired to sleep and she was letting us all know that she wasn't happy about it. She has been much better today though, back to her happy and calm self- thank goodness!

So far we have done a little bit of exploring and a lot of resting. We went to the beach yesterday, it was beautiful! I can't wait to get to go back and actually swim and lay out, I have been missing the warm weather.  We also finally got the courage to brave the roads today and went a whole mile down to the grocery store! It is just so weird to drive on the left. We are just thankful that the car in an automatic so that we don't have to learn to shift left-handed too, it was bad enough with Matt turning on the windshield wipers on every turn instead of the blinkers!

It may sound strange, but the grocery store is usually one of the biggest challenges I face when we move somewhere new. In Germany I had a meltdown trying to shop the first time, it can just be so overwhelming when something as basic as food is sooo different. Thankfully it wasn't as bad today. At least now everything is in English and pretty similar. I couldn't find everything I wanted, but did find substitutes for most things. The worst part is the prices! I feel like I am back in Luxembourg. I had to go without a few things, the worst being COFFEE!!! Sad day! The only kind of coffee I could find was instant which I was prepared to deal with, until I saw the price....$13 dollars for some instant coffee! Wow, I don't think so. I may regret this decision later and cave in, but I couldn't do it today.

I guess I should talk about basketball too since that is why we are here...Matt has started practicing with the team, so far so good. He likes everyone a lot. They are going on a retreat thing this weekend at a beach so I'm sure there will be some male-bonding. His regular schedule will start next week (morning weights and individual workouts, evening practices, and coached a under 20 team) so I guess we will get a feel for what this season will be like then.

Anyway, enough for now...