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HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYTHING CUTER THAN A WOMBAT ON A LEASH???

Why is that wallaby glaring at me??

Various Irwin’s and a croc.

We stopped at the Australia Zoo on the way from Brisbane to Noosa so MEP and Paul could see lots of Aussie animals. I liked the koalas a lot.

We went to the famous bird and croc show in the big arena. It was cheesy but entertaining. Bindi Irwin is a surprisingly bad public speaker though? I would have thought she would be better considering she does it every day…

Anyway the zoo is massive!! They don’t have platypus though. Minus one star.

Great view from our apartment in Noosa too.

Of course I had to go for a swim. The ocean was soooo nice and warm. It was so crowded at the main beach though! Easter weekend was over but I guess a lot of people were sticking around for the week.

Scott and I went for a hike around Noosa National Park. We didn’t see any koalas or whales, but we did see dolphins!

We walked all the way from Noosa Main Beach to Sunshine Beach, had lunch at the RSL and then caught the bus back to town.

We all went on a super cheap sunset river cruise that was actually great. $10! The captain pointed out all sorts of things along the way and we ended up at the lake just in time to see a beautiful sunset over the water. He also got some kites to dive and snatch bits of meat in mid-air. It was relaxing and just great value compared to most touristy things in Australia.

We had a bit of extra time on the last day so we took the scenic route back to the Brisbane Airport via a couple lookouts and a cheesery. WILL U-TURN FOR CHEESE. We all had these extremely intense cheese tarts, which probably took two days to fully digest. So much cheese.

Noosa is nice but maybe a bit too fancy for me. I think there are other places along the Sunshine Coast that aren’t as busy or expensive that would be just as good.

After one last game of Ticket To Ride at the airport, Scott and I flew back to Melbourne, and MEP and Paul flew directly into a hurricane, but we would see them again in a couple weeks.

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A thousand years ago Scott and I flew to Brisbane to meet MEP and Paul.

Our Airbnb was right by the botanic gardens. The view was amazing!

They asked if there was anything I would like from Canada and I said MINI EGGS!! Paul delivered!! They are just as great as I remembered. The Mini Eggs in Australia are gross… the shell is really thick and kind of gummy, not very nice.

So actually a big part of the reason we decided to go to Brisbane was because this year’s Lions-Demons game was IN Brisbane, on the same weekend. Scott and I love going to watch that game every year and tbh if it’s in Brisbane again next year I will consider going again haha.

Anyway we dragged MEP and Paul out the very same day as they arrived from their super long flights. What troopers. MEP decided to nap before the game, Paul decided to nap AT the game. :D :D

Which was amusing because it was LOUD!! And exciting!!

Melbourne dominated for the first half of the game, then like Paul, decided to fall asleep in the 3rd quarter. Brisbane had a HUGE comeback, which obviously re-invigorated the crowd a lot, and made me extremely extremely stressed. Thankfully Melbourne pulled themselves together and got a few more goals at the end and the win.

Overall it was a great game, especially to watch in Brisbane. MEP liked it a lot!

Nice views on the walk back to the apartment.

We walked a bit too much that first day, so the next day we decided to see the city by Segway. It was Scott and my first time trying them. It’s fun!!! It didn’t take long to master. The company runs out of a storage locker. They did a quick lesson with each of us individually, and then we set out on a tour of the city. Minus one star because they didn’t really give us any information about any of the things we were zooming past, but plus one star because we got to go really far and fast, haha.

I’M NEVER WALKING ANYWHERE AGAIN!!!!

That night we went out for dinner by the river, and the next morning we headed North to Noosa via the Australia Zoo. To be continued.

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A thousand years ago Scott and I went to Wilsons Prom for a weekend.

We drove down on Friday night after work, stopping for dinner in Fish Creek. We wanted to have a quick meal so we’d arrive at the campground before dark but the food took 5ever to come out. Oh well, other than it making a bit difficult to pick out a good campsite (Tidal River Campground is first come first serve) we were fine setting up in the dark because we are Master Campers.

**This just reminded me I need to change the batteries in my headlamp. Thanks guys.

Anyway after setting up we just chilled in our camp chairs and watched the wombats wander around and surprise people. Very entertaining. They are brave wombats!! And so pudgy. :D :D

 

After a delicious camp breakfast of bacon and eggs we set out on a little hike. Check out this wombat hidey hole!! And check out my muscley legs!!

We walked out to Pillar Point Lookout and then down to Squeaky Beach. We ate our sandwiches and decided we wanted to swim but it would be a lot easier if we headed back to the beach near our campsite. It was sunny and nice out, but close to the end of summer so the water wasn’t super warm, but once we got in it was pretty nice. I put my head under and everything.

Later that afternoon we put our shoes back on and drove to the car park for the Mount Oberon “hike”. I put that in quotation marks because it was just a road that goes up up up up up up forever. I did not care for that much up hill. It’s not very scenic until you get to the very very top and then it’s SCENIC AF, as you can tell from that picture. We timed it so that we’d get to the peak at sunset, and succeeded, but unfortunately the sunset was a bit boring that evening. Unlucky because the night before the sunset was spectacular!! (We saw it as we were driving to the campground.) Then we hustled back down the mountain and only had to use our headlamps for the last ten minutes back to the car.

PS that’s Tidal River Campground on the right side of the picture. Scott used extreme zoom on my camera and took a picture of our tent. He debated running up the next morning so I could wave at him from down there and now I have ragret that we didn’t actually do it.

We actually had a really miserable night though. It suddenly got super windy, and sand was blowing everywhere. Our tent has a full fly but somehow sand was flying under the edges and into the tent and EVERYTHING was covered. Our pillows were gritty. Our sleeping bags were gritty. Our lips were gritty. To make it worse, it was super hot but we couldn’t open anything up because we would have been covered with even more sand. So sweaty. I did not sleep very well at all. When we woke up in the morning we had grey faces!!

Our breakfast pancakes came out horribly rubbery for some reason and then we felt a few drops of rain so we shook everything out and packed up in record time.

We had planned on doing another hike that day but instead decided to just give up and head home, via a cidery and cheesery.

We went to Gurney’s Cider, which is a family run farm that makes very simple and tasty dry cider. I loved their Scrumpy cider made from foraged apples but it was a bit too pricey for me. I did get a bottle of Wild though.

And we checked out Prom Country Cheese for lunch. We had a massive cheese board. It was intense. It came with a whole bunch of huge pieces of sheep, cow and goat cheese, warm bread and crackers, meat and more. I’m drooling reminiscing about it. Lovely place.

Anyway other than the sand we had a lovely time at the Prom. I would like to go back again next summer, for a bit longer. The beaches there are really great, and wombats are soooo cuuuute. It’s really competitive/expensive to reserve spots there though so dunno. Maybe somewhere else along the coast is better.

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You sick of Korea posts yet? :P Last one.

Scott and I checked out the Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul. It’s a cool set up, they have A LOT of different types of seafood, and you can choose what you want and they will take it to their associated restaurant upstairs who will cook it for you for a couple dollars.

What kind of ray is this?

It was a little overwhelming though, there wasn’t much English inside, and some of the portions were enormous. So we just decided to get some salmon sashimi to go.

Which we ate outside in the sun on the steps of a random building.

Checking out the beach near our hotel in Donghae. The water looked beautiful and clear. I bet the Korean seaside is really nice in the summer.

Variety gimbap in Gangneung. I love how many elements they cram into a roll, even cheese!!

Eating during the Olympics was tricky. We seemed to always be racing to get onto the bus or train that was just about the depart so we ended up missing a lot of meals. And the food that was inside the Olympic venues was cheaper than I expected, but pretty bland. Anyway at least we ended on a pretty good note when we found a nice restaurant to have another dolsot bibimbap, gimbap, and mandu (Korean dumplings) on our last night.

I do regret not eating more seafood while on the seaside though. And we never found the soft tofu local speciality. Doh!

These doughnuts were amazing. Korea knows how to make a good crispy doughnut omg. The market stall was selling doughnuts stuffed with savoury fillings like: kimchi, pizza cheese, red bean, squid, and more. I had a japchae (glass noodles with vegetables) doughnut, and Scott had curry sweet potato. SO GOOD. We also tried hotteok which are like fried doughballs filled with lava caramel and seeds and nuts. Very difficult to eat (I may have had a molten sugar explosion all over my gloves and jacket), but very tasty.

Scott got a red bean fish ice cream from 7-11. It was nice.

Korea seems very… prepared. Our hotel in Seoul came with a fire extinguisher, a flashlight, and a little suitcase with an emergency ladder, and every subway station had these cases with tons of masks. I suppose technically they are still at war…

We stayed in Hongdae for our last night. It is a university area so there are a lot of things around for young people to spend their money, such as: escape rooms, arcades, animal cafes, 85 million coffee shops, phone case shops, karaoke, billiards, smash rooms, etc. And, speciality cafes, like Scott’s dream cafe: Mint Heim. Everything was mint chocolate, aka Scott’s favourite dessert flavour combination. You could even get mint coffee. It was a tough choice, but we decided to try a piece of the mint Nutella cake, and it was good.

Well that does it, I’m all caught up. It was an epic trip. So much fun! It was just so easy to travel there: plenty of English, fantastic transit, quite cheap, amazing food, tons to see. I would return to Korea again for sure, with an extra suitcase and an extra stomach! :D

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So after spending a week in Seoul, Scott and I spent the next 5 days in the mountains riding shuttle buses (and occasionally going to Olympic events).

Feb 14, 2018

Buses: 6     Taxis: 3     Trains: 1    Subway: 1

Events attended: mens curling round robin

This was a rough day because we had to bring our bags from our hotel in Seoul to our hotel in Donghae via Gangneung, then go back to Gangneung for curling, and then we tried taking the free shuttle back to Donghae afterwards. O_O

Curling was cool though. We had great seats, and Canada won!

Scott got interviewed by the Washington Post. He now likes to tell everyone he’s a nationally quoted curling expert. (PS there are two quotes guys!!).

Feb 15, 2018

Buses: 3     Taxis: 2

Events attended: mens hockey CAN v SUI

We were supposed to go to mens Super G in the morning too but it ended up being way too windy up in the mountains so the event got postponed. I was pretty relieved to not have to get up super early to get to the mountains tbh, since it took us soooo long to get back to our hotel the night before on the free shuttle. We would have died. Anyway instead we watched mens skeleton heat 1 & 2 in bed at the hotel, and then leisurely headed back to Gangneung to spend the day at Canada House before hockey.

Canada House was so cool! We got there in time to watch the ladies hockey CAN vs USA game, which obviously everyone was super in to. It was stressful, but Canada won. They had Canadian food and drinks, and even gave out free poutine in the afternoon. We saw lots of athletes, like Tessa Virtue, Alexandre Bilodeau, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford (everyone cheered when they came in), and Jeremiah Brown (rower).

Hockey was good. Our original tickets were SOOOOO HIGH UP OMG. We had like a vertical view of the rink, haha. It wasn’t very full though so about half way through the game we moved much closer to the ice.

After a few minutes in our new seats I realized that we were sitting directly in front of Jennifer Jones and Kevin Koe (and the rest of the mens curling team). They were friendly.

Canada dominated. We won 5-1.

We decided to not bother with trying to use the free shuttle back to Donghae and instead took a very long taxi because #yolo. Well really we had ‘saved’ money by getting a hotel so far away (possibly not the best idea in retrospect) so it was fine. A million thank yous to the Olympic volunteers who helped us get a taxi since we couldn’t use any of the taxi apps without a Korean phone number.

Feb 16, 2018

Buses: 6     Taxis: 2     Trains: 1

Events attended: mens skeleton heat 3 & 4, womens skeleton heat 1 & 2

Another big day. We had to get up early and head into the mountains after very little sleep for mens skele, then kill 8 hours, and stay out late for womens skele. AND THEN do the epic journey from the mountains back to our hotel.

There were no spectator shuttles to the top of the track so we had to hike up… TWICE!!! We did 160 flights of stairs that day, omg. It was exhausting, but being at the start was so fun. We cheered and yelled and cowbell’d for everyone until our throats ached.

Tired but very excited at the sliding track.

The mens race was a bit of a runaway. Yun Sung-Bin is an excellent slider AND had home track advantage, so he dominated. The crowd was SO HYPED for him, which was cool to see.

Martins Dukurs had a rough race. He was in 3rd position after the first day, moved up to 2nd on run three, and then made a mistake and dropped out of the medals to 4th on his final run. I was heartbroken for him. A Russian (who also competed in Sochi but somehow managed to not get caught for cheating like every single other one of his teammates) got silver, and GB got bronze which was a bit of a surprise.

We had a lot of time to wait until the ladies race so we checked out the Pyeongchang Olympic Plaza. The sponsors had giant exhibits, many of which involved VR, which I had never tried before. This one was kinda fun, you had to use the gun to shoot down these flying thingies while dodging getting hit yourself. We also went to a hologram K-pop concert, haha.

We also went to the Olympic Superstore, which was super huge and super crowded. I got a Soohoorang skeleton t-shirt and we got a few pins and magnets too. Everything was so cute!

We spent the rest of the time in the Bing Bong Bing Bong food tent, as I like to call it, until it was time to head back to the sliding centre.

Look who we found!! Rob was my skeleton coach in Whistler a few years ago. Since then he’s been coaching the small nations on the World Cup circuit, and was coaching Australia for the Olympics. So cool to see old friends.

Ladies skeleton was funnnnn. It was a much closer race than the mens, and it was impossible to tell who was going to win after day 1.

Feb 17, 2018

Buses: 4     Taxis: 2     Trains: 1

Events attended: womens skeleton heat 3 & 4

I think I slept in until 2pm this day. We were so exhausted we just ate McDonald’s in bed and watched Olympics on tv/tablet/laptop ALL MORNING and AFTERNOON. It was glorious.

Eventually we headed back to the sliding centre. There was tons of traffic so we didn’t get there in time to hike up to the start area, so instead we watched in the crowds at various corners of the track. It was packed, again. It’s so amusing how everyone gasps and screams and cheers as the sliders fly past. I sort of forgot how skeleton looks to the layperson, who is just amazed by the speed and not analyzing the lines and such. The excitement is contagious.

Although the Canadian girls didn’t finish quite as high up on the list as I thought they might, I’m still so so proud of them. They each had some fantastic runs throughout the competition and some excellent start times. I loved watching all of them.

Currently wearing three pairs of pants, three shirts, and three heat packs. :D

Feb 18, 2018

Buses: 1(!)     Taxis: 2     Trains: 1     Subway: 1

Events attended: womens curling round robin

Our last day in the Olympic area. :( We dropped our bags at the train station, spent the day in the Gangneung Olympic Park, and then took the train back to Seoul.

We only had to take one bus today!!! Because you could walk from the train station to the Olympic Park (this was the view on the walk). It would have been extremely useful to know that everything was super convenient by train. All the shuttle buses were train-centric. It probably would have been cheaper and easier to just stay in Seoul the entire time and just take the train every day than stay in our love hotel in Donghae. Ah well though, there was no way of knowing that ahead of time, and I am still so thankful for Jinnie saving our butts and helping us find any kind of hotel at all.

Our last event was ladies curling. The Canadian ladies weren’t doing so hot, although they did win this game. The Korean girls were doing very well though and because of that the place was PACKED. Actually we could barely even see anything because our seats weren’t that good and the Korean fans were going bananas. Everyone kept leaning forwards and moving around. I don’t think anyone was actually sitting in their real seats. Once they finished their game though EVERYONE left and we could watch the last few ends of our game in peace.

And that was that! Olympic time over. It was SO TIRING, but extremely fun. We learned a lot, so our next Olympics will be better. ;) Calgary 2026 perhaps?

PS that popcorn had four different flavours in it! And the beer was only $4!