Road trip!

Yikes, I've been doing a terrible job of blogging regularly.

It's been busy here, but lots of fun. This past weekend, Pauleen and I took a road trip up to Bathurst, New South Wales. But first, it's probably good to go back a little bit on the updates.

Dog training is now well underway for the honours students' project. The dogs are learning a visual discrimination task and it's fun to see the different techniques each dog uses to try and figure out the rules. So far we have Princess Lulu far out in the lead compared to the other dogs, but we think everyone will figure it out if we give them enough time!

All of a sudden, the semester is nearly over. We've finished marking (aka grading) the student essays, and there is only one more tutorial left, and a video project they have to do before the end of the semester. It's all a bit nuts - time is going by so quickly!

The other day, I got a message from my sister telling me that her company, Alter Eco, now sells their chocolate at Coles, one of the major supermarket chains here in Australia. I was sent on a mission to find the chocolate and take a picture. Of course I forgot my phone when I went shopping, so I *had* to buy one instead - I had no other choice!

I picked the least dark one. Yummy!

 The semester ended last week for my stats courses - which means 2 semesters down, 4 more to go! I'm only taking one class over summer semester though, so hopefully it won't be too stressful. I should figure out when classes start again though...

OK - now I think that basically brings the blog up to speed. This past weekend, Pauleen needed to drive up to Bathurst, NSW to pick up a dog, and asked if I wanted to come along for a little road trip. The trip to Bathurst from Bendigo is about 8 hours if you drive straight through, and about 9-10 hours with breaks for car fuel and people fuel. Bathurst is a fancy little town, about 2.5 hours outside of Sydney. Apparently lots of rich city people own weekend properties there.

Trip from Bendigo to Bathurst, courtesy of Google Maps

On the way up, we were driving at night so there wasn't much to see, but on the way back it was a beautiful drive. New South Wales (or at least where we were driving through) was much greener than home, and we drove past miles and miles of pastures with sheep and cattle. We even saw an emu (which Australians pronounce e-mew) and a camel! I guess some people keep camels as "pets" - although I'm guessing it's sort of like Americans keeping zebras as pets.

On the drive back, we stopped at an iconic road trip stop, the Dog on the Tuckerbox. There wasn't much to see, but we each had a Tucker Box Burger for lunch - with beetroot in the burger. Odd, but I like beets so it was actually quite tasty.

Miss Audrey will be 6 months old at the end of this month. She's growing up so fast - and my time here in Australia is going by so quickly too! Before I know it, three years will be up. Hopefully by then I'll have learned lots, experienced lots, and (most importantly) finished my thesis! :)