Aussies call it the Lucky Country and we consider ourselves incredibly lucky to be able to spend so much time here. We love Australia. We love South Australia. We love the Barossa Valley. We love Angaston. And, of course, we love those crazy Aussies.

This commercial makes us both cry like babies every damn time we watch it. It’s as if the Australian Tourism Commission wrote it just for us.

Many friends have sent emails and a lot of readers have left comments on JimandJamie.com asking, “What happened? Where are you guys? Why did you suddenly stop blogging after you arrived in Australia?”

Well, we suppose it’s about time to answer those questions.

Unfortunately, Jamie’s dad, Bill Dawson, passed away in early November. She flew back to California as soon as she found out he was ill, and, luckily, got there before he died, and then spent the next couple weeks with her mom.

Dawson was definitely one of a kind. I can’t say we always saw eye to eye, but I surely appreciated everything he did for Jamie. He was, in reality, her stepfather, but she thought of him as her real father. He came into her life at a time when she was drifting, without any real goals, and quickly became her biggest fan. He encouraged her to make something of herself and paid her way through college to help her do that. She called him every week — from wherever we were in the world — to make weekly bets on NFL games. They were as close as any father and daughter could possibly be, so losing him leaves a huge hole in Jamie’s life.

She arrived back here in Angaston, South Australia in mid-November, but we’ve decided that it just doesn’t feel right to resume blogging about all the fun we’re having nor under the circumstances to show happy, smiling photos of ourselves.

So in honor of Dawson, we decided to bring JimandJamie.com to an early, but appropriate close.

We’ll be here in the Barossa Valley until the end of January, and then we’ll be back home in McKinney in early February.

Until then, bon voyage. And bon voyage to you, too, Dawson.

While we’re waiting to get our computer problems fixed, here’s a very funny Aussie TV commercial.

One of the things we love most about Aussies is that they have such great senses of humor about themselves. Ricky Gervais proves it in this commercial for Optus, an Aussie telephone company.

Apple gave me a new iPad and a new keyboard, but they can’t figure out what the problem is, and oddly enough, it persists even with the new equipment. We’ll be back with new stories and photos as soon as it all gets ironed out.

If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Now that the hacking problem has been cleared up, my keyboard has gone kaput. We’re taking a trip to the nearest Apple store tomorrow and hope to get the problem cleared up.

Keep checking in because we’ll be back online soon.

We’ve received lots of emails. Some people said the site was slow and unresponsive. Others said they got a pop-up notice that said, “This site has been hacked.”

Turns out it had been hacked. I’m a technological moron, so I can’t explain the how or why of it.

But Russell Kasselman of IronDogMedia.com, our California website guru, has cleaned it all up. (NOTE: If any of you need a website designed, I highly recommend Russell. He’s the coolest.) Thanks, Russell.

We’ll be back with new stories soon.

Broome’s beach is wide and flat and at low tide the sand is packed hard as concrete. Hundreds of cars and trucks race back and forth on the sand every evening at sunset.

You’ll find shrimp on the barbies and chardonnay in the glasses at hundreds of tail gate parties stretching for miles along the shoreline.

We enjoy going for a late afternoon/early evening beach walk, but we always need to keep an eye peeled for cars and trucks barreling down the sand.

Big news. I finally talked my nervous wife into letting me take our car onto the beach last night. Sure, lots of other cars were doing it, but she was convinced that her moron husband would somehow get the car stuck axle-deep in sand.

Jamie was happy as soon as she realized we wouldn’t need shovels to dig the car out of the sand.

Everyone else may have been drinking chardonnay, but Jamie had a canned ginger beer with rum and I had a bottle of water. I’m the designated driver and she’s the designated drinker.

Here’s Jamie standing in front of Sun Pictures, also known as Sun Picture Gardens, the only movie theater in Broome. It’s been showing movies since 1916, which makes it the world’s oldest operating outdoor movie garden.

What’s an outdoor movie garden? Well, from the outside, it doesn’t look much different than any theater, but it’s a whole different story once you walk through the door and purchase your tickets.

Once you’re inside, you’re actually outside because there’s no roof. We chose a couple canvas deck chairs, sat down, and watched our movie with giant bats swooping overhead and geckos crawling across the screen. (Bats weren’t the only thing flying overhead — airliners occasionally roar right over the theater as they make their approach to the airport, which is only about three blocks away.) We saw The Martian. which was a great adventure film, but the coolest thing was that Mars rose above the screen as we watched the movie.

Nowhere but Broome.

A few years ago I decided I wanted a Nissan Xterra just because they looked so damn cool. Jamie seemed to think it was the dumbest idea she’d ever heard, but she agreed to accompany me down to our local dealer to check them out.

I found a row of them and was already choosing my favorite color when a salesman wandered over our way in search of a quick commission.

When I asked him how much it would cost to upgrade from cloth seats to leather and from manual transmission to automatic, he laughed. There was no leather available. There was no automatic trans available.

Turns out I didn’t really fit the buyer profile for an Xterra. Which brings us the subject of Aussie vehicles for which I also do not fit the buyer profile.

Unlike me, these Aussie men are manly sons o’ bitches and this is the vehicle most of them wrestle down the road in this neck of the outback. It makes an Xterra look like something designed for floral deliveries.

It’s a utility vehicle, known out here at a ute. That bulky, heavyweight steel contraption across the front of the ute is a safety device known as a roo bar because it keeps the ute from being totaled when it smashes into big ass kangaroos hopping down the middle of the road. And that big black pipe rising out of the left side of the engine compartment is a snorkle, which allows the engine to continue getting oxygen when most of the vehicle is under water during a monsoonal flood. (I feel compelled to admit that I really don’t understand the mechanics of how that snorkel thing is supposed to work, but it sounded good when I wrote it, so I’m going with it.)

I want one. I need one. How cool would it be to drive around Texas in one of these monsters?

Hmmmm. Wonder if they come with leather seats and automatic transmissions.

Remember this Energizer battery TV commercial from back in the 80s?

That’s Mark “Jacko” Jackson, a famous (infamous, perhaps) Australian Rules Football player. I have no idea why an American company hired an unknown Aussie spokesman like Jackson, but he was such a manic, wacky character that I always loved this campaign. I may have been one of the few who did.

But that’s beside the point.

At the end of this commercial, Jackson looks into the camera and says, “Energizer! Oi!”

Jamie and I were talking about Aussie lingo today and one of us said, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi!” We both laughed. It makes absolutely no sense to Americans, but it’s chanted at Aussie athletic events and is roughly equivalent to American sports fans chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.” “Oi” is the Aussie version of “Hey!”

The best is when one fan, or maybe one side of a stadium screams, “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!”, and the rest of the crowd responds with, “Oi! Oi! Oi!”

Just another one of those odd Aussie-isms that we love.

Here. I found a YouTube video compilation of a lot of different Aussies doing the chant. So much fun.