Fosters Down Under: July 2014

After seeing Drew Carey last year in Sydney, Stacy was uber excited about the fact that Wayne Brady was coming to town. We purchased our tickets months in advance, had a friend set up to babysit Matty for the evening, and were looking forward to seeing this multi-talented man in the place we currently call home.

Unfortunately, as luck would have it, Matty came down with his very first fever/viral illness a few days before the show. Blair very kindly offered to forgo the show so that he could take care of Matty while Stacy headed to the show with one of her friends. What a great Daddy/husband!

The show itself was setup exactly like "Whose Line Is It Anyway." The entire show was improv-based, with Wayne and his stage partner creating characters, scenes, and songs on the spot with topics that were chosen by the audience.

Wayne was just as good live (if not better) than as he is on TV. What a fantastic show! Highly recommend seeing him if you ever have the chance!

These are not great photos, but the best we could get! :)

This past Canada Day weekend, we headed to the Snowy Mountains (known as the "snowies" to most Aussies) to celebrate being Canucks! It took us two years of living in Australia before we would even fathom heading to the snow, but we figured we needed to get there before we moved home, and really... what better place in Australia could we have picked to celebrate the birthday of the best country in the world?!

The drive to the mountains is about 2.5 hours south of Canberra in the state of New South Wales. It is a fairly scenic drive which passes through a handful of small towns along the way. One thing that stood out to us along the drive was that - as we got closer to the snow - the number of snowmen signs attached to buildings began to increase dramatically. It was quite comical, really. There were snowmen, like the one below, plastered to every storefront and awning on the main street of Cooma. Also of note was that every.single.store offered both ski equipment and snow chain rentals.

The snowy mountains, located in the Kosciuszko National Park, are the highest mountain range on the continent. Australia's highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko is located at a height of 2,228 m (7,310 ft) above the ground. The mountain range experiences large natural snowfalls every winter (June/July/early August) and host several snow resorts including Thredbo, Perisher, Jindabyne, and Selwyn. We happened to choose Thredbo to head to on this particularly snowy weekend.

A colleague of ours had told us to stop at a Christmas store in Bredbo on our way to the snowies. She said that this store had every kind of Christmas item you could ever imagine. And she was right. It was kind of crazy!

Christmas store!

Some of the hundreds of thousands of Xmas ornaments for sale

After our stop at the Christmas store, we continued along our way to the snow. We knew there had to be snow in the mountains as there had been a large storm only the day before, but we didn't end up seeing any until we were inside the National Park (only once we were at an extremely high elevation). Once we were inside the park though, the roads ended up being quite snow covered. Given that we were driving in summer tires, there was enough snow accumulated for us to actually consider puling over to put our snow chains on (which, by the way, are legally required to be carried by all cars driving in the park).

Since we had Matty with us, we had no intention of skiing when we arrived. We had planned on having some lunch, taking the chair lift to the top of the ski hill to check out the view, and perhaps letting Matty play around in some snow while we took some pictures. Unfortunately, the snow was just too wet for us to ride the chair lift - we would have been absolutely drenched within minutes of getting on. Instead, we headed indoors to grab some lunch. Low and behold, the cafe at the resort was selling "Hot Cheesy Chips" - aka poutine! As we were celebrating Canada Day, we simply needed to order it. Unfortunately they were an extreme let down. They tasted so bad that we each only had a few and then threw the rest out. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised by this.

Hot Cheesy Chips for _only_ $12 :S

Nasty 'poutine'

Following lunch, we headed outdoors again to let Matty play in the snow. As a true Canuck (moreso than his parents, we'd say), he absolutely LOVED the snow. On our way out of the park, we drove through Lake Crackenback (a resort area on a lovely lake). We've decided that we will head back there sometime this summer to enjoy some of the outdoor activities they offer (it looked like it could be great fun for our little family).