Jamie actually ordered a “beet root turmeric almond milk latte” for breakfast this morning. Jeez.

You can never see too many kangaroos. On previous trips we’ve seen dozens of them gracefully bounding across the empty outback. We’ve seen them hopping down Angaston’s main street and seen others basking in the morning sun in the vineyards that surround the village. We’ve petted their soft little muzzles in wildlife sanctuaries. We even visited a golf course outside of Melbourne where thousands of them gather every afternoon to nibble on the fairways. And later this year we’re flying to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory to visit a sanctuary where they rescue and raise orphaned joeys (baby kangaroos) before releasing them back into the wild.

But no matter how many times we’ve been Down Under and no matter how many kangaroos we’ve seen in the past, it’s always exciting to spot the first one on each trip.

The beauty we spotted today was just minding his own business, sitting alongside the road at the edge the bush about a hundred yards from the entrance to our hotel.

I’ve never before re-run a story from any of our previous travels, but this may be my all-time favorite story and we’re back in Broome where it happened, so what the hell. Here you go:

There’s a frog in our toilet in Broome, Western Australia. I’ve tried to get him out, but he’s a clever little bugger and always manages to climb into an inaccessible little crevice where I can’t reach him.

We’re staying in a wonderful resort hotel called the Bali Hai. We stayed here five years ago and one of the reasons we came back is because we loved the outdoor bathroom that came with our room.

Now don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not an outhouse. It’s very cool. We’re in the tropics here and the toilet and shower are outdoors, accessible only through a door from our room, so we can shower out in the warm, inviting tropical breezes. And, of course, the fact that the toilet is outdoors also makes it easier to understand how and why a frog has taken up residence in it.

But let’s pause briefly for a little back story:

Terry Deal, one of the first people we met in San Luis Obispo, is a demented son of a bitch, which may explain why he married Sandy, a psychologist. Being married to Terry must be like living in a case study for her.

A dozen or so years ago, before we moved into our new home, Terry was telling Jamie all the things she would enjoy about life in Edna Ranch. Then he said, “But there’s one thing you have to watch out for. Rats in the toilet.”

Jamie was horrified, which was exactly the reaction Terry wanted, so he continued.

“They climb up the sewer line into the toilets. So if you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, always turn the light on to make sure there’s not a rat in your toilet.”

Terry is a wonderful man, Jamie thought. I have immense respect for him. He wouldn’t make up something like that.

I, on the other hand, thought, Of course he would. He’s Terry Deal. Making crap up is one of his specialties. His ability to make the preposterous sound reasonable is one of the things I love about him.

Well, damn it, the woman has been turning on the light and waking me up in the middle of the night for twelve years now. I’ve told her that there are no rats in the toilet but she chooses to believe Terry because (a) He’s an esteemed educator and author, (b) He’s a doctor, and (c) He’s not her husband.

So that brings us back to the frog in the toilet in Broome, Western Australia.

Thanks to Terry Deal, Jamie is afraid to use the toilet. She’s fears that the frog will bite her on the butt. Or worse.

I hope you’re happy, Terry.

I love astronomy, but I’ve never known Jamie to show any interest in the subject. Not until this trip when she decided she wanted to do a stargazing tour.

To do it right, you need to be in a place with no light pollution, which usually means far from a city. Unfortunately, the skies were cloudy on Madeira and in South Africa and the recently-departed astronomer had not yet been replaced on Mauritius. So we were out of luck until Jamie found Greg Quicke, the operator of Astro Tours here in Broome.

Good thing we have a rental car because Greg’s 2-hour astronomical extravaganza takes place in a wide clearing in the middle of the outback, twenty minutes outside of Broome. Greg says it’s the perfect place to experience some of the planet’s best stargazing skies.

When we (and forty or so other guests) arrived, we found about a dozen telescopes of various sizes aimed toward the heavens so we could all view the moon, the planets, the stars, and even gaze at empty places in the sky that are jam-packed with stars when you view them through those telescopes.

Of course, some nights are better for stargazing than others. You want a dark night with as little moon as possible so that the rest of the sky isn’t washed out by lunar light. We were lucky enough to be here just a couple days past the New Moon, so it was just the smallest of crescents, a tight-lipped little smile in the evening sky. Our timing was also very good because it dipped behind the horizon very early in the evening, leaving the sky just as dark as it could possibly be.

Coincidentally, it was also the Vernal Equinox, the first day of Spring, the point on the calendar when day and night are equal (more or less).

Here’s Jamie standing in the middle of the clearing in the outback, just after we arrived, just before sundown.

Not a great shot by any means, but it shows you how low the moon was on the horizon at the beginning of the evening. A few minutes later, it set beyond the horizon to leave us in complete darkness.

Here’s what the clearing looked like at the end of Greg’s astronomical extravaganza. The perimeter of red lights allows us to navigate from telescope to telescope without stumbling into each other, yet don’t interfere with the nighttime sky. The Milky Way is really incredible on a clear night away from city lights. It almost provides enough light to read by.

We’ve seen a lot of natural beauty on this trip, but this is the most beautiful sight of all.

Not something you see every day — camel tracks in the sand.

As the tide slowly recedes on this broad, flat beach, it leaves designs in the sand that look like boab trees. Kind of artsy, huh?

Broome’s Cable Beach fills with hundreds of cars and trucks and utes every afternoon before sundown. The beach is so broad and so flat that it still looks completely deserted. But the moment the sun disappears behind the horizon, it looks like rush hour in Los Angeles as they line up to leave.

It just feels good to be back in Broome.

Holy crap. This may be the best photo we’ve ever taken. The sun, the moon, and camels on Cable Beach.

We can’t blame the moon for smiling. Life is good here at Cable Beach.

Damn, we love the Aussies. They are without a doubt the funniest, most irreverent people on the face of the earth. It’s really rare to meet one we don’t love.

But the language? If you look it up in the encyclopedia, it will tell you they speak English, but they really don’t. Oh, sure, the words sound vaguely English as they roll out of an Aussie’s mouth, but we often walk away thinking, What the hell did that guy just say?

Our friends in Kalgoorlie (abbreviated to “Kal” by the locals) referred to “Chrissy decos” and “workie visos” the other night. We had to stop and ask them what they were talking about. We knew they were shortening words as is the Aussie habit, but we didn’t have a clue what those words might be.

“Chrissy decos” are Christmas decorations and “workie visos” are the colorful, reflective safety uniforms worn by workers.

Here’s a hilarious video that explains it all:

Calling Lake Ballard the strangest place in Australia is quite a statement considering how many places are worthy of that title. Nevertheless, it wins the official JimandJamie.com nod.

Lake Ballard is not easy to get to. You really have to want to get to it. And we did. (You’ll see why in the photos below.)

If you start in Perth (where all things in Western Australia begin and end), it’s a seven hour drive east to Kalgoorlie, followed by a two hour drive north to the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it town of Menzies. That’s where you turn off the main highway and go directly west. You’ll cover 18 miles of paved road followed by 12 miles of dirt road before you reach the turn-off for Lake Ballard.

But when you get here, when you walk up and over the low berm that surrounds the flat, dry, empty expanse that’s really more salt flat than lake bed, you’ll take one look and say, “Wow! That’s really strange. But very cool.”

What prompts that reaction is a completely unexpected and incongruous display of 51 alien-looking steel sculptures scattered across 2.7 square miles of dry lake bed and salt flat.

I suppose this isn’t unusual considering how difficult it is to get to Lake Ballard, but we were almost alone as we wandered around the salt flats. On this clear, beautiful morning, Jamie and I accounted for 50% of the visitors viewing this remarkable art installation.

It’s all the work of British artist Antony Gormley who described it by saying, “I just wanted somewhere with an absolutely flat, more or less 360 degree horizon. [I chose] the west of Lake Ballard, which is an extraordinary lake 70 miles long and 30 miles wide, with this sodium crust that makes everything stand out absolutely clearly. It’s an amazing place. It’s in the middle of what’s called the Yilgarn Craton, which is one of the oldest bits of the surface of the earth. It’s between 2.9 and 3.5 billion years old…”

Like I said, strange but very cool.

You can’t write about Kalgoorlie, Western Australia without getting out your thesaurus and looking up the word “big.” Words like colossal, enormous, gigantic, huge, immense, massive, and tremendous are sure to come in handy.

The Super Pit, located literally a stone’s throw from the center of Kalgoorlie, is one of the world’s largest open pit mines. It’s so big, in fact, that it can reportedly be seen from the International Space Station.

Swing a pick into just about any piece of open ground out here in the Australian outback and you’re likely to strike some kind of valuable ore. They’ve discovered vast deposits of gold, silver, uranium, iron, nickel, diamonds, coal, and a dozen other minerals, but none of them are mined on the scale of what you find at Kalgoorlie’s Super Pit. It produces 850,000 ounces of the various precious metals every year. Since it opened in 1989, it has produced over 13 million ounces of gold. To repeat, 13 million ounces of gold.

When I say large, I mean LARGE. The Super Pit is currently 2.1 miles long, nearly one mile wide, and around 1300 feet deep. “Currently” is the key word because they’re still digging, so no one really knows how deep or wide or long it will eventually go before the gold runs out.

The top photo shows The Super Pit. Believe it or not, the roads at the top of each terrace are about the width of a small freeway. Look closely and you may see an immense “dump truck” filling one lane on one of those roads.

How big are the trucks?

Well, in the second photo, Jamie’s standing in the front scoop from one of the earth movers used down on the bottom level of the Super Pit. She’s dwarfed by that scoop, so just imagine how huge the earth mover it’s attached to must be. And then consider the fact that each of the dump trucks used to haul ore up from the bottom of the Super Pit holds four of these huge scoops of ore.

Each replacement scoop costs $1,400,000. That’s for just the scoop, not the earthmover that goes with it.

Big just isn’t a big enough word.

One question: What did they do with all the dirt they brought up out of the Super Pit. One would think there would a huge mound of dirt the same size as the pit, but we looked around and didn’t see one. Maybe Tina, Wendy or Tiny can answer this question.

Our friends Tina and Wendy, otherwise known as the Langer sisters, live in Kalgoorlie, a mining town east of Perth. As far as I know, neither of them is a miner (although they were both minors when I first met them).

The town was founded during a gold rush in 1893 and mining is still one of its primary industries. Take a look at some of the exquisite old Federation style buildings around town and it quickly becomes clear that a lot of money has passed through this town over the years.

We do and see a lot of incredible things on these crazy trips around the world, but one of our favorite things is visiting Tina and Wendy, the Langer sisters, in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

If you’re not a regular JimandJamie.com reader, you may be saying, “Who the hell are the Langer sisters?”

You can find the answer to that question here and here. The story of how we reconnected after 40-some years really is amazing.

We arrived in Perth, Western Australia on Sunday morning, then caught a flight out to Kalgoorlie, an old Federation-style gold rush town about 375 miles east of Perth.

We had dinner at a beautifully-restored pub built in 1896, a lot of laughs, and even a few tears when we parted company the next morning.

Here’s wishing the best to Tina, Wendy, and Tiny (Wendy’s husband) until we meet again in 2019.