Travelog for: Tippi W

Tippi is currently waiting, with his bags packed, to receive his tags.  He will be flying off to Australia as soon as we receive them! Look out world, here he comes!

Tippi is headed to Sara's place in Australia.  Monday, January 26! His very first journey, Thanks Sara!!!

Hi mom! I've arrived in... well... not so sunny Australia anymore. When I first arrived it was very very hot. Which was the end of the extended drought they've had. Although no real rain has come besides little bits here and there the last day and a half it's less dry and more humid... I'm sure you heard about the fires in Victoria. We've heard nothing but that on the news lately...

The death toll is up to 181 and the population of Australia is only 22 million so that's a massive death toll. On the news they told us it might double before the fires are over. This would now be something to go down in history (not so great history I might add) as the worst natural disaster to hit Australia!

On my first day I got to pose with outside because well... it's nice and sunny out and who wants to go outside when it's that hot? lol... here I am in the sun room (yet in the shade) of Sara's house... :-)


...then we turn around and bang... we find something that seems to be finding a cooler spot in our house rather than outside... a huntsman spider...


would you like a closer look? he's not too big maybe 2-3 inches... they're good to have around Sara says because they're harmless but will kill all the nastier spiders like red backs and white tips which are extremely poisonous...


well I hope you enjoyed my first post I promise they'll get more exciting as time goes on! :-) write again soon! :-)

It's been cooler so Sara's pets have been more active so Sara's been able to take some photos of them... we decided to get in the shot because she seems to own a zoo. She's a huge animal lover though and takes great care of her pets... lets see, here I am in front of her mice...

...they didn't really want to sit still for the photo but there are 5 of them in a huge mouse mansion as Sara calls it... they're happy since their cage just got a nice clean out.. now they're organizing things to make it their own again... haha they're so cute! :-)

...and here I am in front of the birds...


...now the question is... how many if any of those birds can you name? I know they're very hard to see so Sara took some photos. It's interesting because all the birds besides one is native to Australia. Click the name to get more information if your interested about the bird(s). :-) First we have the Society Finch...

The pair of society finches are the only ones not native... they're actually not native to anywhere... they were always captively bred so they're very good in aviaries and will pick up where other birds have left off sometimes in raising baby birds. :-) Aren't they nice? They're very friendly little birds. Sadly when Sara got them they couldn't fly more than 6 inches off the ground because they had been stuck in a tiny cage their whole life. They're much happier now. :-)

Next bird is the Spice Finch they're also very friendly birds and they get along best with the Star finches. :-) They like to wake up every morning to chirping... they're very cute! :-)


...now were getting into the kind of stranger of the birds... the beautiful little Diamond Dove they're the worlds smallest dove and they're very peaceful birds... they are very quiet except for the occasional"hoot hoot" noise...


Then we have the birds that live at the bottom... the little Button Quail these guys are two males, Milky and Red Baron (names fit well) it's hard to get photos of them sadly so Sara had to just deal with what she got here...


...then we have the beautiful Gouldian Finch they're very vocal birds and Sara swears they know they're pretty... but aren't they? The bright one is a male and right next to it is a female of the same type. :-)


...and last but not least of the birds we have the Star Finch there are two different varieties... the yellow face and the red face. You can see the red face and the yellow face in this photo. The red face are a lot more common... they're beautiful birds and the first finch she got was the yellow face male (the one with more yellow on his face) on the left hand side. His name is Peep. He's also the one in Sara's avatar with his "girlfriend" Dotty... also known as Peeps girlfriend in this house you'll find out why in a minute...


...if you want to hear what these birds sound like you can hear Peeps unique song here... you can hear the normal red face singing here who is Mr. Peep and ends with the white male zebra finch Frank. :-) Now as to why we call them that... just as we were about to go away they cuddled up together so Sara took a shot...

Aren't they adorable? :-)

Anyways, there's also the fish but they're happy being in the dark at the moment and Sara doesn't want to scare them for the photo... but we also have Anni... Sara's 10 month old beagle puppy...


Anni had to stay in the cage while photos were being taken because Sara can't fully trust her to leave it when she responds... case in point... Anni being good and Anni being naughty... it's a new trick so I can't expect miracles... :-P But yeah, now you've been introduced to all of Sara's animals... I hope you enjoyed having a bit of a tour on the animal side of Sara's house... write again soon mom! :-)

Today we took a trip to Sydney. We had to go to Camperdown for an appointment for Sara's son, Andrew. But we decided since we had a bit of time to check out some of the local beaches... well, since Camperdown is pretty much in the CBD of Sydney we were directed to the beaches of the CBD. Which are extremely crowded, hard to get to and overall a pain in the butt. Especially driving, people don't drive in the CBD for a reason... but the GPS took us there so that's where we went... the concrete jungle was too much for the GPS though because it kept driving us in circles before finally getting us out... needless to say we gave up going to that beach and just decided to head back to Camperdown...

Although I don't have any photos of me (it was too hard because we all kept slipping off of the dashboard) in the CBD but here are some of the things we saw...



This is coming into the CBD around Darling Harbor. If you can see that little gold star on the left side of the picture... very pretty... and look at all those huge buildings...


The next photos is the middle of the CBD on the main street of Sydney, George Street.



In these photos you can see the Queen Victoria Building it's a very iconic landmark of Sydney... very beautiful isn't it?  Here's the statue right out front of it... Queen Victoria... if you look at the link connected to the Queen Victoria Building you can see what it looks like on the inside... very elegant!

Next on the short tour through the lesser known CBD icons is the clock tower on Martin Place... isn't it gorgeous?


Last but not least we got to see the AMP Tower people climb up on top of it and walk around the edge in what's called the Sydney Tower Skywalk part of the walk actually has a clear walkway so you can see straight down! Crazy!

Well those are the lesser known parts of the CBD of Sydney. I hope you enjoyed the walk through so to speak. We hope to be taking another trip to Sydney in the coming days *fingers crossed* Write again soon mom!

Wow! Sara got the fright of her life earlier this morning. Remember that tarantula? Well, it disappeared for a few days. Her and her husband kept remarking that they should find it because it's a big spider and well, you really want to know where it is... because having something like that spook you... well isn't fun. Well what happened early this morning (around 2am) Sara will probably never forget...

Sara was sitting at the desk and then looked down at her hands and saw some legs moving towards her hand. She quickly pulled back and stood up. She even made a whimpering noise... how crazy is that? Someone so big... compared to something so small? Well it decided to make a home between her keyboard and mouse so Sara decided to show us how big he was... so here I am... do you see it?


Pretty dark eh? Well, here's with the flash... I'm sure you can see him now...

Definitely not something you want crawling on you in the middle of the night. Sara thinks it might have actually had to crawl across her stomach to get where it currently is... oh my gosh that would give me the heebie jeebies! You can bet she went straight to bed after that little incident...

Hopefully we'll take another trip to Sydney again soon! Write again soon mom! Miss you!

Hi! It's been really boring around here lately.. Sara hasn't been able to get out as much as she would have liked to so we've been sitting at home with her... well, nothing much interesting has been going on but today Sara tried kangaroo for the first time. So she thought this was note worthy... we all smelled it and it actually smelled really yummy! It looked just like a steak and Sara says it actually just tastes just like beef, but very very lean, almost no fat at all.. yummy!

Not much there but sometimes I wish we could try new things too - so here was Sara's dinner (or part of it anyways) from the other day. I promise more interesting things ahead in the days to come! Write again soon!

Today we were taking a small road trip. No where exciting but Sara took this as an opportunity to show us what the Central West is full of... which sadly isn't all that interesting, but hopefully you'll find it a bit more interesting... it's very dry and brown here. There's been barely any rain, so now that it's Autumn, we're hoping for a bit more rain... *fingers crossed* first stop we went to a small town called Blayney which has a population of only 3,000 people...

Here I am at the top of the highest point in Blayney, Church Hill... you can see the whole town from here...


...and here's the rest of the view around Church Hill from where we're standing...




Coming down from Church Hill we went down the main street to our next destination... here I am on the main street which is called Adelaide Street...


We're back on the road again... I'll update more soon!

Next stop was the Blayney Wind Farm and Carcoar Dam which is just outside of Blayney and Carcoar... here I am in front of the wind turbines...


Sara also decided to show you Carcoar Dam... if you click that link you can see what Carcoar Dam used to look like. Since the Central West has been in a drought for so long the water level is much much lower than at the moment... here I am in front of what is left of the dam...


Kind of puts it into perspective how much of a drought Australia is in, especially inland from the coastlines... here's a closer image of the water level. You see that line on the hill just below the trees? That's where the water used to be... can you imagine THAT much water evaporating? Scary isn't it?


...and here are a couple more photos of the wind mills that run the wind farm...



Write again soon!

Next stop was Carcoar which is one of the many tiny towns between Blayney and Cowra, so we decided to get a few photos. Carcoar has a population of around 400 people... so very small, here I am on the main street...


...there's sadly not much to see here but Sara took us down to the little river that runs through the town. Sara says her and her husband Daniel used to drive here from Blayney to here to have picnic's once in a while. :-) Isn't it pretty?



Back on the road... we're almost there! Another 40 minutes or so... write again soon!

Last stop, we're finally there! We've arrived in Cowra which is a town about half the size of Orange, with around 13,000 people. There's not too much to see here... Sara and her husband had to do a few mystery shops. So we just waited, after all the jobs were done we all went down to the Lachlan River... we saw a LOT of bird life while we were there... here I am in front of the river...


Walking down to the river there were a lot of aboriginal paintings on the underside of the road (which passed over the river)... here are some of the paintings...



Can you guess what some of the animals are? Well, there are dolphins, echidna, turtles, fish, dugong, kookaburra, and snakes. How interesting is all that? Isn't it pretty?

You can't tell but there are HUNDREDS of Long-billed Corella's... they're making heaps of noise but they're fun to watch. Sara took a short video of them in the tree... you can watch the video here. It's short and you can also hear the noises they make... they were crazy... here are a few snap shots of them as well...





...and we even got to see a bunch of Australian Wood Ducks...


After spending an hour or so at the river we decided to head home. It had already been a long day and it was only 230pm. Crazy! Well back home we go... write again soon! Miss you mom I hope you enjoyed my day out!

Hi mom! Sara sent me off to Japan today... since that was next on my list anyways and she hadn't heard back from you. But she knows JaymeC is very reliable so I know I'll be safe there... I'm on my next journey. I wonder what I'll get to see there! Write again soon! <3

Dear Mommy,
I haven't heard from you in a long time! My new host, Jayme has my password from my last host, but I'm sad I haven't heard from you. If I don't hear soon I'm going to head home after Easter since I'm supposed to go home after each visit anyway, and I hope you'll be glad to see me! In the mean time, I'd like to tell you about all the adventures I've been having here.

My first day here we tried to go for a walk on the beach, but there was some sort of concert going on! It started raining so we headed inside.

Oh my! My very first day here and I got to fulfill one of my goals. After walking and walking, we found a small Sanrio store!

Its Hello Kitty Overload!


Finally on the way home we stopped for some McD's. Yum!

More in the next update...
Tippi W

The rain kept up for awhile so we went to another indoor play area! Here I am at the entrance.

This was fun, it turned round and round. I kept falling over!

And we sat in the balloon area for awhile. There's giant fans that blow the balloons around!

We also drove a car for a bit

We had lots of fun!
More in the next update...
Tippi W

Mommy,
Today we went to the aquarium here on Okinawa. Its very famous! We stopped along the way at a bridge to have a picnic

We had bento boxes, yum!

Here I am at the entrance.

Here's a little further down the path at the front of the aquarium, closer to the ocean

Inside we got to see lots of tanks. This is the largest natural lit reef aquarium in the world!




At the end we finally got to the whale sharks. They're huge!


We also stopped to have some icecream

We headed outside and went to the dolphin show.



More updates soon!
Tippi W