We Are Family
Song titles seem to make a regular appearance as titles for my blog entries. Today we have one from Sister Sledge. The family reference appears due to recent contact with some relatives in Australia. It would be terrible to go all that way and not meet up with family and thankfully they seem to feel the same way. Therefore I have offers of places to stay for my time in Oz, at least in the Sydney area and also Melbourne.
This will be a great time to get to know people whom I would normally never even get to meet. According to my current plan I will be in Sydney for the middle of December so I hope to have a Christmas down under with my extended family. It will be nice to have a sunny day for a change on December 25th.
The time in Oz will be good for that reason as I don’t know anyone in New Zealand apart from those Bootsnall insiders who were gracious enough to offer me advice on where to go in New Zealand. I find it easy to meet new people so am not worried about spending too much time alone apart from the time I want to spend alone that is.
I do feel a tinge of guilt leaving England again. It almost feels like I am avoiding the reality of getting back to work. It is at times like this I need the voices of other travellers to come to my aid, to tell me it is ok to be selfish, to just do what you want to do for whatever reason because you just need to do it. Until I leave on Friday I will continue to feel this way. Only when I am on the move will I feel a sense of peace. Well, I can add another reason for going to my list. I will have gained a few more family members which will spur me on to organizing that family tree I often talk about working on.
I just noticed I am still using the American spelling for words that either have an “s” or a “z” near the end. I hope to return the the US when I can for although it has it’s faults it was an amazing experience to spend so much time living there. Perhaps if the South Pacific captures my spirit I may spend some time living down there too.
Today was spent fixing the creaky floorboards in my folks house before the new stair carpet is laid on Wednesday and taking a few millimetres off the bottom of a door so it clears the new bedroom carpet in my Brothers old bedroom. It took 4 trips to the back garden to plane it and back up the stairs to hang it before it was right. Then some of my boxes of “stuff” shipped from the US were taken up to the attic to await my return. The house now almost resembles the way it looked before I descended upon it 9 weeks ago.
The house will soon be left with only a ghostly impression of my visit. I will have a faint memory of my mothers home cooking and the few glasses of red wine I would partake in the evening. I will soon be surviving on peanut butter and spaghetti hoops for breakfast (thanks Laura but I may pass on that suggestion), spend my days looking for folks with transport travelling in the same general direction as me and crashing out in dorm rooms in an attempt to save money for special occasions such as sailing in the Whitsundays off the east coast of Oz, swimming with Dolphins off the coast of New Zealand, white water rafting around Wanaka or Queenstown, kayaking in Abel Tasman national park and buying drinks for new found friends made on the road.
Man oh man, who wants to be doing all that…?!! ;0).
Tags: Pre-Trip
