$15 to hold a koala? Yes, please.

As the end of our touristy stuff nears, we had to make one more important stop- at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary! (Casey Green, please take notice to this posting!). We spent almost 4 glorious hours at this marsupial and koala sanctuary petting and learning about kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, kookaburras, and of course....koalas! This wildlife park was designed to help raise awareness for endangered Australian species, as well as care for many of their koalas in residence. We paid the extra money to hold the koala on shift for the afternoon, Gandolf. All I can say is that he is cute, soft, quiet, slow...and heavy! We loved learning all about the different animals, and the looming scent of the eucalyptus didn't hurt, either! Check out some of our favorite pix:

And my favorite animal moment of all time, capturing this picture of mum and joey up close :)

(What we're thinking in this pic): "THIS PLACE ROCKS!!!!! WE WANT A KOALA!!!!"

Summer and Brian's individual photos with Gandolf can be viewed here:

Summer and Gandalf, Click Here
(*Note that Summer's pic is rated PG-13)

Brian and Gandalf, Click Here

Lastly, many of you blog visitors have requested more photos. I must apologize for not posting more because 1. blogger is user friendly, but slow for uploading pix, and 2. It's even SLOWER here since we've come down under!

Brian has promised to post some galleries of photos and we'll post the actual links to them on this blog. Stay tuned for that...But thanks to all our blog visitors! It's a lot easier than mass emailing, but please be sure to find us on skype or email us what's going on back home! Missing all of you...