Buckle up and Hold That Lizard

What has the steering wheel on the right, the stick shift on the left and scares the *&^@! out of me? Our new car! What fun.
We got a Mitsubishi WhoCaresItMoves. It's silver. All cars here are white or silver to reflect the sun. So it's only 500 degrees when you get in instead of 505. Yes, it is just a "car." No 4-wheel drive, extra gas tank, 4 feet off the ground thing with a roo-bar in front. Sorry to all you folks who think we're roughing it on the desert frontier - that's a good 10 miles from here.
The couple we bought it from lives a block away. They just got married. The husband works with Tom and the wife is from Elysburg, PA. Yes, and she worked at Knoebel's campground and Geisinger.
I must say, when I first took it out for a solo drive (why endanger more lives than necessary?) I started grinning, then smiling this big, unstoppable smile! The cab drivers have been nice and we've gotten everywhere we needed to go, but the freedom of driving, alone, in Australia, is such a thrill.
The round-abouts in town are much easier than they looked from the backseat of a cab. Remembering to stay on the left is fine if there are other cars and I even parallel parked today with only one re-do. I keep an overly-firm grip on the wheel and will not dare put music on yet, but it's coming. I still turn on the windshield wipers when I mean the turn signal, but I was told that's called "The American Wave."

THE REPTILE CENTRE

This new-found freedom made me drag Thomas out of the house yesterday to find somewhere he could play without involving me. I added the library, a haircut and the promise of ice cream if the haircut went well.
We found the library but went past it to find lunch. Since that involved parking(!), walking around and getting turned-around, we lost the library but found the Reptile Center! I had been wanting to go since we got here, but we just hadn't.


It's really a made-over house with a crocodile in the backyard. Seriously, I think the man just turned his brick rabler into a snake and lizard zoo. It's neat! Lots of glass enclosures of really deadly snakes, many lizards both behind glass and outside in short-walled pens and then a salt-water crocodile.
"Terry" floats in his concrete swimmin' hole. Terry mostly spends his days below water, so you can go down steps and see him from underneath. He surfaces every 15 minutes or so to breathe and look longingly at unsuspecting, delicious tourists, mutters to himself about the thick glass and rebar fence, then dejectedly sinks again.
The staff puts on a show and tell in the air-conditioned "fossil cave" 3 times a day. It was very good. The young woman told us how to act around local snakes - run if they're at least 10 feet away, stand perfectly still if they're less. She brought in a friendly cadre of a python, bearded dragon, blue-tongue skink and a 2-headed or sleepy skink which was my favorite.
If a predator grabs them by the tail, they poo copiously in its mouth, and if that isn't enough, swing their actual head around, latch on and cannot let go until they feel safe again. Otherwise, they hardly move.
Thomas held all the animals he deemed appropriate but could hardly wait to get back to his true friend - a sweet little monitor lizard who simply walks around the floor where he pleases. I forget his name as he was named after someone I never heard of, but I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of him.
Of course, the questions at bedtime were, "Do you think we could have a lizard that walks around our house?"
"No."
"Do you think it will want to snuggle with me in my bed?"

The haircut went well. He picked honeycomb-caramel ice cream.