Hail the Queen of England -'cause she gives us more holidays!!

Today is one of the many holidays we get due to Queen Elizabeth. Today is her official birthday! Yay! Her unofficial birthday (the day she was actually born on) was sometime in March. Never fear though, we were able to send her birthday wishes via a website. We got a response back saying "The Queen wishes her technical employees to thank us for our birthday wishes." We're fans of the Queen due to all the holidays we get because of her. A day off now and again is pretty nice.

We've had a car for the last few days. We were performing a concert down in Jervis Bay about three hours south of Sydney. There were four of us playing for a fund raiser for the Woodwind department at the Con. The Con saw fit to rent a car to the group to drive down there. Due to circumstances, neither of the Australian members of our group could be at the rental place when we picked the car up. This meant the legally only Ruth Ann and I could drive. Now, I drove a bit in Tasmania and did OK, but driving in downtown Sydney scared me. Luckily we got it Saturday morning when traffic was low and made it out of the downtown area. Hertz had initially misbooked the car so it looked like we might not get one. The only other one we could have was a new(ish) Nissan something-or-other. Guillaume, our very French Hertz clerk, compared our car (equally) to a Mercedes so we were pretty pleased after we made sure it was an automatic transmission. Neither Ruth Ann nor I drive stick shift very well and having the gear shift on the left side would have been too much!

We decided to take advantage of having a car to run some errands. We went to Target and got a little heater/fan combo. His name is Zippy and joins our ventilation system of one other little fan (who's name is Hoppy). We also went to the grocery store and stocked up on all the essentials now that we didn't have to carry them back on the train. We got a 10 Kilogram bag of rice(22lbs) so we'll never run out now!

We had to give it back this morning. It was nice to have a car for a bit. It's good we had to give it back now instead of after driving it around more: to refill the tank, it would have cost us $75! It sort of makes U.S. gas prices look not so bad.

We go back to 'school' tomorrow. It is now the study vacation which means no classes or anything. We do have to go into work. Other than that we just have to get ready for our juries next week. After that we have nothing for 5 weeks! We going to Tasmania at some point during those weeks.

Now that we have them loaded, here are several pictures from Tasmania. The first two are of Tasmanian devils at the Tasmanian Devil park. The Ranger went into the devil pen and picked one up by the tail. It snuggled down into her arms and let us pet it!!






The next one is of a wallaby we saw out in the wild. He was on the side of the road and we got up close. All he did was look sleepily at us and scratch himself.




The last pictures is of Port Arthur, the former prison colony.



~Mike