The Royal Dreness Arrives

My dear friend Andrea arrived here on Easter Sunday! She boarded her plane in Denver Friday evening and arrived at 7:30 on Sunday morning, completely losing the 22nd of March from her life. Thankfully, she'll leave Brisbane next Monday at 11:00 and arrive "one hour later" in Colorado. Traveling sixteen hours ahead is quite crazy and she has surprisingly adjusted quite well. But could I really expect any less from my dear friend whose response to every question I present her with is "I'm up for anything!" Mix that with a few "what could be better?'s" and we're talking A & A adventure time.

After experiencing a few blogging "lows", I am newly inspired to capture our adventures this week. Keep a look out because I'm hoping to update each evening:).

We picked Andrea up at the airport on Sunday morning and Jonathan took us on a detour to a real Aussie sheep shop on the way home. He told me to pick out my early birthday present: real Australian UGG boots! There is a long story here in regards to "ugg" and the controversy over the American company stealing a common name in Oz that has been around forever. Anyway, I couldn't decide on what pair I wanted most, so we'll return to actually purchase them. Needless to say, I'm excited :). After that minor detour, we made it back to our home for a big brunch (we missed church sadly because Dre's flight was late) and then headed to the beach. The day was finished off nicely with an Aussie-style BBQ.
The only pic outside the sheep shop courtesy of Andrea

A beach pic at Mooloolaba

Today was quite the day. Due to the extremely busy holiday weekend, it was a big cleaning day at the Chateau Royale. I agreed to clean today and then asked for the rest of the week off to spend time with Andrea. Since Jonathan had the day off, I offered for Andrea to sleep in or hang out with Jonathan. Instead, she said she wanted to clean with me! And oh, what fun we had as cleaning partners. Although tempting, I'd never brought a camera along to work in order to document my ventures :). Since Andrea is the picture taking queen, she made sure we captured each exhilirating moment. Almost as great as the rain forest pics, here are some of us in action...

After spending a big portion of the day cleaning, we headed on the Buderim rain forest hike to the waterfall. It rained this morning so it was a bit of a muddy trek. Kind of like how the Rockies never lose their majesty (even when passing the continental divide views each day for work they never lost their "wow" power), the forests here continue to amaze me. Of course Andrea was equally "wow"ed. We only had one minor catastrophe when she saw a jumping lizard and screamed, scaring me to death. I guess we had just been talking about the most poisoneous snake in the world living in Oz, so she was a bit jumpy. We'll work on that:). Following the hike we went for a run and made some amazing chicken curry as well as lamingtons, an Australian original coconut and chocolate-covered cake. Here is Andrea having fun with the powdered sugar as she mixed the chocolate sauce! They turned out to be quite good. Maybe I'll post the recipe sometime (as I have been known to do that) but for now we are heading to bed because we're serious about the sunrise adventure that awaits.