March 19-21, 2011

Hamilton Island is a tropical vacation paradise. The atmosphere and the pace of life reminded us a bit of Lanzarote on the canary islands, except there were far fever fat Germans and drunk English and Scandinavians. We had our breakfasts outdoors:

We spent our first three days here with schooling in the morning and early afternoon. We then ventured out arond 3-4pm to get some air and sun while it was not too hot. We have found that this is the formula which works best. Schooling after a beach/pool session is very difficult. The kids are often tired and don´t have the carrot of fun waiting at the end of the school session.

It is always a challenge to motivate both us and the children for the schooling. We are after all on the voyage of our lives, a voyage Helene and I have dreamt about doing for 20 years. It sometimes feels very hard, and counter-intuitive, to sit down and do school work when there are so many things to see and learn about around us. Here we were, on a vacation island with great surroundings and we were doing math and science lessons. But you gotta do what you gotta do

There were several nice pools close to us:

Ready to go swimming:

The kids had a ball

In addition to the cockatoos, there were rainbow lorikeets everywhere:

We did expeditions down to the general store, the only place to get groceries. The whole island and almost all the hotels, apartments, restaurants, stores etc, are run by the same company which is controlled by the Oatley family. The general store was outrageously expensive and gave associations to the store in the Grapes of Wrath movie. Here are the boys down at the “shopping strip”

The harbor was beautiful:

Let´s take a closer look at that guy on the roof over there:

The difference between low and high tide can be up to 3 metres here. Here is the beach at medium tide:

And at low tide:

At one of the low tides we ventured out to have a look. There were lots of crabs and small fish in the ponds:

Further out there were corals

Moving water and sand create many natural works of art:

And so do some of the little critters living here:

Iseline lost another tooth, after having pulled on it for quite some time. She was anxious to get it over with and also see if the tooth fairy was able to find us:

The tooth fairy did manage to find us here also, she must have some very good intelligence sources.

Eirik

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