More travels

As many of you know, I traveled to Australia two weeks ago.  Perhaps I should change the name of the blog to "Adventures in the Eastern Hemisphere!".  Australia was very nice.  I was there for work, but we had about a day and a half free; we took full advantage of the free time, visiting wineries, seeing the sights and white water rafting.  We actually spent a full day rafting, and it was some the best rafting I have done.  The only thing that would have made it better would be if Tom were in Australia with me.  I have pictures from the rafting trip, but I used a disposable water proof film camera, so once I get them developed and loaded on a disk I will put up the good ones.  Here is one of me petting a Koala at the Night Zoo:

And the kangaroos at the zoo:

A beautiful gorge we stopped to see:


The landscape as we drove from the ocean up to a farming plateau known as the Tablelands:

As soon as I got back from Australia, we turned around and flew up to Saipan for a quick overnight visit.  One of our students from the Academy graduated in May, and her family had a huge graduation party for her.  Since we missed out on all the rest of the graduation festivities and on so many other events with family and friends we decided to go up for her party.  It was a nice time.  

Other than that, there has not been much going on here.  We did some diving this past weekend, and plan to do some more before Tom leaves for Japan this coming weekend.  He will be in Japan until the end of September, so all of you blog fans can look forward to more frequent posting as I try to occupy myself.