Since our last post we have had a really busy year. Spencer started and finished his second and final semester at the Adelaide, Australia campus. We were excited to find out that our little family will be growing, our baby will arrive in mid-August. We did not find out the gender of our baby just like Topher, we are so excited for the supries to meet our baby. Just before we left Australia we got to go to a true Aussie Rules Footy game, it was so fun to watch Topher get excited to watch the football. While we were planning our return to the United States all the flights layed over in Fiji for a couple hours so Spencer decided that since we would already be there for a lay over we should spend a several days and enjoy a vacation.

We stayed for a few days in Fiji and it was beautiful! We stayed in a resort on the beach that was awesome, and spent most of the days shopping and walking around the town. We spent one afternoon walking through the Garden of the Sleeping Giants, and it was absolutely majestic.

Now we are back in the USA, we spent a couple of weeks in Utah and visited family and all of our great friends. It was a short lived visit, so we packed up all we have, and took a road trip. Spencer was offered an internship at General Motors in Detroit, Michigan and we took it. Eleven of the twelve weeks have passed, and Spencer has done extremely well. We have enjoyed our time in Michigan and find it a beautiful place to be. We have taken a couple trips north of Detroit, and enjoyed some great time with Spencer's brothers family. When Kassie finally has the baby, we are looking forward to spend a few more days with them as well.

We have found a great new place in Pittsburgh, and will move in, in a couple of weeks. Although we have lived in a Marriott for three months, and have been completely pampered while we where here, we are looking forward to having a place of our own once again. So, with this, we bid you farewell...until we have the baby at least...

This year we had the opportunity to have our first Thanksgiving at our own home. Spencer was in the middle of his first semester at Carnegie Mellon University here in Australia, so Kassie did a majority of the baking and cooking. Spencer made the rolls the night before, and Kassie rocked out a spectacular turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, stove top, gravy and fruit salad. Because we wanted a traditional United States Thanksgiving, we went all out on all the food. We had planned for a lot of food, and so we invited over the full time missionaries and a couple that lives down the street from us that we have become great friends with. In true Thanksgiving tradition we stuffed ourselves full, and sat around the rest of the night doing very little. Kassie stayed at our home with Christopher and Renee, while Kent and I (and a few other guys from the ward), went to a friends home and played XBOX for several hours. It was the first time that Spencer played video games since we left the United States, and he loved playing.

After the new year we planned out a road trip to travel through the Australian Outback and see some of the sights that many people have told us about. We jumped on the internet and found a few very good deals on hotels, and booked them. We started our road trip the day after Spencer's birthday and drove nearly nine hours straight. We stopped for gas and a play at a park for about an hour, and stopped for the night at a small town called Coober Pedy. It is a unique town, but we had a good night. Our hotel was quite nice, and bug free - which was our only bug free hotel for the trip. We ate dinner at a pizza diner and the food was okay. We awoke early, and got on the road for another day of driving.

We only had to drive for 7 hours to our next destination of Alice Spring. When we pulled into Alice Springs we were surprised on how big it was...due to the fact that it is smack in the middle of Australia. We had a great dinner out in the town, and walked through the city the next morning. We bought several nice pieces of art, and a few generic items that I am sure most tourists pickup. Our hotel was absolutely wonderful. It had a massive pool right on the edge of the outback. Christopher, Kassie and I spend a few hours in the pool and had a great time playing frisbee with another family that was roadtripping. We went to a reptile house, that had so many big lizards, snakes, toads and even a salt water crocodile. We held, pet and saw all kinds of native Aussie creatures. Christopher loved touching and watch most of them. A few of the lizards and dragons made him a bit uneasy, but once we taught him that glass was in between us, he was alright with them.

Later that same afternoon we drove 4 hours to Uluru and checked into the nicest hotel of the trip. It was located in the Ayers Rock / Uluru Resort. We checked into the hotel, and drove right to the rock. We stayed there for a couple of hours and watched the sunset. It was majestic. We drove back to the resort and had a wonderful meal at this great little cafe. Christopher had a great time playing in the hotel, and crashed a short time after we got back to the room. The views from our hotel room were wonderful.

And as soon as it started, we were loading up the car and heading back. Because of the distance we had to travel, we booked the same hotel at the half way mark, and enjoyed the same nice bug-free hotel room. We adventured through Coober Pedy, and found a great chineese diner. We had the best food. It was a complete dive, and would be questioned by many, but we took the risk and it payed off. We had a great drive back, and stopped to steal a rock and some sand from the outback, and also got some great pictures of a wild flock of emu's.

Overall the trip was perfect. If the opportunity comes up to come back to Australia, we will do it again. Although we saw some wildlife on our drive, the real numbers were in the roadkill we made. 7 birds and 5 lizards were sacrificed to the Road Trip Gods this trip. Now before you PETA goons freak out, they were not intentional, they just happened.