> C-sec recovery went well although the first 2 weeks after were pretty painful. Luckily I was able to find the stamina to go with the fam and Dayna to Sydney for a couple of days. Pics from the trip are here.

> After Sydney we hung out in Canberra for a week and then got wild ideas of doing some more traveling. We planned and left for the Great Barrier Reef all in one day! We drove back to Sydney and flew to Cairns for 4 days of heaven. The area kinda reminded me of Hawaii but much less commercialized and with many more creature features (crocs, sea snakes, blue octupus, cone fish, box jellies).

> David scuba dived and got nipped in the hand by Nemo’s Dad…David is hooked and wants more scuba.

> Because of my recent c-sec I wasn’t able to scuba but the rest of us saw the reef from a semi-sub. Amazing!

> Went to the Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation. I desperately wanted to see a saltwater croc in the wild but didn’t see any.

> All of the beaches had croc nets up including the one out the front door of our beach apt (last minute hotel deals are the shaniznit!)

> Because we booked last minute flights back to Sydney we were only able to get a flight arriving at 10:30 PM. That would have been ok but we had to jump in the car back to Canberra because David had booked flights out to Melbourne from Canberra the next morning. After getting lost in Sydney and then driving in massive night fog we didn’t arrive home until 3 AM. We stayed up most of the night packing and then got back onto a plane a couple hours later. Can’t tell you how wacked out that was.

> At first glance Melbourne reminded me of a typical US city however, once you got down to street level it was a whole different story. I think it is one of my most favorite cities…incredibly artsy, thousands of cafes and restaurants (Melb has more restaurants per capita than any other city in the world), loads of unique shopping, little inner city back alley bars, shops and cafes, fantastic museums, bayside beaches, clean…awesome.

> David, me, Dayna, Logan and Charley all stayed in our friend Ray’s 1 bdrm apt for 6 days….we got to know each other very well! Modesty went out the door. ha ha!

> Drove down the Great Ocean Road…walked through a serene rainforest, had a wild koala encounter (wow!), watched super surfers surf Bells Beach (where Patrick Swayze surfed the “perfect wave” in Point Break) and saw the 12 Apostles.

> We came home and dropped dead from tiredness….can’t believe we did what we did while I was supposed to be recovering and with 2 kids!!! Would do it all over again if I could.