Today we had a fairly full day of animal viewing planned. Only having two full days in Australia, we have had to be selective on how we spent our time. Yesterday was Little Penguins (that is their name, because they are... little). Today our mission was to see every other stereotypical Australian animal.

The day started pretty much as normal. I was up and had cranked out about 3 hours of work before any of the other family members even woke up. Once everyone was up and moving, about 9am, we headed over to the same little coffee shop as yesterday and pretty much duplicated our same order. The server was lovely and even remembered what each of us had ordered to drink from the previous day. If I lived in Melbourne, you could probably find me at a table in this cafe just about every morning. I have decided that making your own coffee or tea is very overrated. The scrambled eggs were very interesting. They were super orange and looked like they were loaded with cheese, but it was just the color of the yolk. Breakfast attacked and defeated, we headed back out onto the roads of Australia to go the Healesville Animal Sanctuary. I have to say, I must be getting better at driving on the wrong side of the road because Melissa only said ‘one lane please’ a few times the whole drive!

The Healesville Animal Sanctuary is about an hour and a half from our hotel up in the Yarra wine region, and has the highest concentration of stereotypical Australian animals we could find. Beautiful hillsides and vineyards, often with sheep grazing among the rows of grapes. We almost had the whole sanctuary to ourselves. Some nonsense about it being winter, during a school and work day, and the pop-up rain clouds. Seeking adventure, we would not be turned aside. We saw, kookaburras, emu, wombats, wallabies, kangaroos, koalas, swamp rats, cockatoos (which I did not know were a native bird), and many more. Feel free to ask Ryan about interesting animal facts, including how long the kookaburra spends raising their young. Speaking of cockatoos, there was a whole gang of them hanging out in the trees and along the side of the road on the way to the sanctuary. Just hanging out, like we see crows or pigeons in the States.

I know everyone is wondering about the cute little platypus; yes, we saw those as well. Did you know the male has a venomous barb on its back leg? I am not sure whether this proves or disproves evolution. Why would the universe need a beaver, with a duck’s bill that can detect electrical current, that lays eggs, with a pouch, that has fur, feeds their young milk (it is a mammal after all), AND has a venom barb on its legs? This is truly all the spare parts crammed into on adorable little animal. Healesville was a really cool place to see all of those things in the shortest amount of time.

For those of you with some knowledge of Australian animals, you will no doubt recognize that I left a very important animal off the list. It is the other egg-laying mammal, the echidna! I saved this guy for last because we had the opportunity to join a keeper into the echidna enclosure and get an up close and personal introduction. The sanctuary has three of these adorable little animals in the enclosure and we were able to feed them a delicious slurry of kangaroo paste and pet them on their little spiny backs. There were so funny to watch waddle up to the dish and shoot out their tongues while they ate. Their normal diet consist of ants and termites. They use their 8cm (~3 inch) tongue to reach into an ant or terminate hill to lap them up. I am pretty sure they would not be able to get a kangaroo in their mouth, but that is what we had to feed them, and they seemed to like it just fine. It was a unique experience I will probably never get again. After the awesome day with all the animals, we hopped back into the car and made our way back to the hotel.

Once at the hotel we debated going out for dinner and some shopping or just ordering room service and making an early evening of it. Since we had to be up at 2am in order to get to the airport for our flight to New Zealand, we ordered some room service and hit the sack early. That way we would be ready for whatever adventure the next day brings!`