Kangaroo Sighting

This afternoon/early evening, I made Josh drive out with me to Lake Broadwater. It's a conservation park about 30km (20ish minutes) southwest of Dalby. It marked a couple of firsts. It was the first time that I drove 110 km/hour on an Australian "highway" and it marked the first time that I saw a LIVE kangaroo out in it's natural habitat.

Here's Lake Broadwater:

According to the Dalby information website, when the lake is full it covers 350ha and you can ski on it. From what we saw, there is no way that anyone has waterskied for many years.

Can you see the white beady eyes in the dark picture above?

It's a kangaroo! This is the first one that we saw. It was over on the left side of the road and when I slowed down, it hopped right in front of our car and stayed over to the right side of the car for a couple of minutes just looking at us. It was about 20 feet from the right hand side of our car. It was AWESOME!

And then we saw 4 more! Unfortunately, the picture above was the best picture that we could get. The camera was really blurry (I think from the car), the light was really bad and our zoom wasn't cooperating. But trust me, they are the cutest creatures. They don't look like giant rats at all. Apparently the ones that we saw are the smallest ones that Josh has seen. They were probably only 4 feet tall when standing on their back paws and Josh says that the ones out by work were more around 6 feet tall (the dead ones I saw looked bigger too). Maybe there's a difference in the species.

The sunset over the Downs was beautiful (as always). I'm just glad that our car didn't break down 30km from home out with the kangaroos.

And then I drove home going 110 km/hour in pitch-black darkness.