It's hard at the moment not to fall headlong into the trap of thinking each day, 'it's not long now until this trip will be over ...'

That's a bittersweet thought - I mean, there have been countless times I've wished to be back at home, or to see familiar faces, or to taste a particular dish I've cooked in my own kitchen a thousand times. The problem, after all, with craving the new and the unknown is that it isn't necessarily consistent. One day, you can be revelling in the foreignness of everything, and the next can see you gasping for the familiar.

But the real problem is this. It's troubling to me that this slightly sad, wistful notion that the trip is coming to a close keeps insistently worming its way inside my head. Troubling because it's not all that true.

We are about two and a half months' shy of returning to Australia - an obscenely large chunk of holiday remaining, then, in anyone's books.

I want to shake myself, like a wet puppy flinging off mud, and insist that I get it into my head that IT'S NOT OVER YET!

There's no call to be sad or despondent or nostalgic for the trip, because, point blank, it's still going on. Why this is difficult to get into my noggin, I don't know. I suspect it's just because in the scheme of a 12 month RTW, the last couple of months really do have a 'tail end' feel to them.

It's easy for worries to crowd your head about returning to Real Life post-travel. I find myself distracted at the moment by a lot of concerns about what life will hold when we return. That's not necesarily bad, but it does take you out of the moment quite significantly.