I’m back from Australia.
In fact I got back to Anchorage in the wee hours of yesterday morning, after an epic journey of some 38 hours (four flights plus layovers in-between), partially recounted in my Daily Tweets post from Saturday. And then yesterday I slept. And then I got up & called a few people & vegged out. And now I’m back at work today (writing during my lunch hour) — but I’m not completely recovered from the exhaustion of travel.
I had some high hopes when I left on December 4 for Australia. I’m so very glad to say that almost all of those hopes were realized. I had a great time. I loved the country. I loved the cities I visited — most of my time was spent in Brisbane, but I also spent time in Sydney, Melbourne, and the country town (near Melbourne) of Castlemaine, as well as brief visits to other communities mostly in Queensland & Victoria. I loved the people, especially the friends I stayed with — Sian & Rachel in Brisbane, Carole in Sydney, Maria & Carmen in Castlemaine. I really love Australia. And I will most definitely visit again.
The high hopes I didn’t realize were my hopes to keep my Flickr photostream and blog up-to-date with photos & stories about my adventures in the Great Southern Land. As of this writing, I’ve only got uploaded to Flickr photos through December 12 (see my Australia photos here), & the only blog posts have been Daily Tweets posts automatically generated from my Twitter feed.
But fortunately, I can still fix that. And will. In the next however-long-it-takes, I’ll be spending time at home sorting through & uploading photos (to Flickr) through the rest of my travels. I’ll also write blog posts here illustrated with photos, along with slide shows (where they exist) of all of a day’s photos. (There were, believe it or not, a couple of days when I only took a couple of photos. Mostly because at one point I got sick.) I’ll be post-dating them to fit within the chronology of when the photos were actually taken (but for truth-in-advertising, I’ll also note the actual date that each blog post is written/posted).
So if you are still interested to hear about my trip, stay tuned.
In the meantime, I’m very glad to be back home in Alaska. It’s my great fortune to be able to return from one one-of-a-kind place to another.
But I’m already counting pennies for a return visit.
