We woke up at 6 am Wednesday to begin our travel and landed in Sydney at 7 am Friday so we just stayed up and spent the day sightseeing in the city, ending up at an evening show at the famous Sydney Opera House.  The next day we went to Torango Zoo, Manley Beach, and a few other stops around the harbor by ferry, giving us a front row seat to see the city lights after sunset.

Sunday had us on the way to the tournament site over the mountains and through the woods.  We were on a kangaroo hunt.  We finally found them deep in the bush of the Blue Mountains when they became active a couple of hours before sunset.  By the time we had our fill (or when it was too dark to get good photos) we realized that we were a long way from a place to sleep, much less top off the gas tank!  Fortunately, we found the only hotel for miles just before they closed for the night and they had a room available and reopened the kitchen to make a pizza for us.

We arrived in Mulwala Monday evening and while Andrea participated in judges' clinics, I took a drive to "find the outback."  I made it to a town with the slogan, "the edge of the outback" but didn't have time to go too far in.

During the tournament, we got tons of tips and advice from the locals about how to spend our week after the tournament.  We settled on a drive along the Great Ocean Road which did not let us down.  We found more kangaroos, birds, and the bucket-list koalas!  Not only did we see wild roos and koalas, we were treated to somewhat rare shows by both.  We drove up to a mob of roos and while we were still sitting in the car, two of them started getting riled up so I grabbed my camera and started shooting.  Unfortunately, it was after sunset and my shutter speed was way too slow for a 500mm lens hand-held!  Still, the experience was cool.  The next day we found a forest area where we managed to spot a number of koalas up in the trees.  Since they sleep 20-22 hours a day, eat the leaves of the trees they sleep in, and don't drink water, it is pretty rare to see them move much less on the ground.  We saw one walking around in the branches eating leaves, but we also spotted one climbing down to move to a different tree!  Jackpot!

The coast along the way was stunning, and the water of the Southern Ocean was crazy bluish green.  We hiked a number of scenic areas along the way before arriving at Phillip Island to watch the penguin parade where we had a front-row seat to see several "rafts" of penguins  swim up to the beach and then skittishly form "waddles" to trudge across the low-tide sand to their nests where they were greeted by mates and young.  Over 1100 penguins returned to the nesting area that night, literally walking right past us!

After a stop in the capital city of Canberra we were back in Sydney for our flight home.  Thanks to all who gave us advise for our trip and to all of the super-friendly locals who made our trip AWESOME!

A co-worker from WV told me about this thing called "Bridge Day" back in the mid-90s.  Being that we now live about four hours from the area, I looked into it.  Since you had to have something like 40 or more logged jumps to register, it was not something we could do but since the weather was perfect and the colors had peaked, we decided to take a very scenic drive.  I will try to post some video after I explore how to edit it and do that sort of efficiently.  Maybe I'll have to explore Instagram at some point :-(

The first shots of the bridges from below was taken immediately after the event ended and the crowd had cleared out.  If we go back someday, we'll hike in to that point again and get some awesome shots from that angle.

The new year started with our first trip to Mt Tam.  Although you can see it from our neighborhood (header photo), it takes about an hour and a half to get there because of narrow, winding roads.  We'll go back!  It is a beautiful location but this first visit didn't do it justice.  We arrived late in the day and rain moved in over night so we left in the morning.  Still, I got a couple of decent photos and learned an important lesson...

We were within the boundaries of state park but had not passed through any entry gates so we were not sure where we would be allowed to park the van overnight.  We opted to park in a pullout right at a nice overlook and see what happened.  After dinner and a game of cribbage, we noticed that the fog was dispersing a bit and the city lights had come into view so I got my tripod out and here's where things went bad.  I could not get a good photo to save my life!  Everyone of them recorded camera movement no matter how carefully I set the tripod, how gently I pressed the shutter release, or how long I set the mirror-up delay before the shutter would open.  I recalled having this problem once before and solving it by changing lenses.  Although I didn't know just why that would make a difference, I chalked it up to the new lens being a shorter focal length and therefore allowing better results at slower shutter speeds.  Unfortunately, I had not brought any other lenses with me this time so I finally just gave up.

After returning home, I was obsessed about finding the movement problem.  I could not find the throw-away photos from the last time I had the problem because... I guess I deleted them.  Go figure!  So I turned to the lens manufacturer's forum where I learned that I'm not supposed to use the lens's image stabilization feature if the camera is already stable!  Apparently my lens was recording the movement from my pushing the shutter release and attempting to offset that even though I kept taking more and more precautions to have absolutely no movement when the shutter actually opened.  To top it off, at first I wasn't even that careful about pressing the release since I knew all movement would stop before the exposure.  A few of the images where I was super careful about tripping the shutter release turned out to at lease be salvageable but another trip to Mt Tam is now essential!