Melting

Lora and I arrived safely in Broome yesterday, after a harrowing day of driving that took us over 900km in one day. We began our journey up the West Coast of Australia from Perth to Darwin 8 days ago in our nice rental car stocked full of our gear, food and emergency water stores. The drive from Perth to Darwin is approximately 4400 km and can technically be driven in three days. However, we were going to “take our time” and travel for about 3 weeks through Western Oz, seeing all the sights along the way. Due to our lack of planning and research, we landed smack in the middle of school holidays, and our route was one that would be taken by thousands of families in campers and cars pulling trailers and boats up and down the coastal highway. Our route would be Western Australia’s equivalent to going to the Grand Canyon on 4th of July weekend, and as much as we tried to catch up, we never got ahead of the game. [read on]

Perth, which is the capital city of the state of Western Australia, has the distinction of being the most isolated capital city in the world. It is closer to cities in Indonesia than it is to other cities in Australia. One might think this would lead to a closed off or backwards mentality, but in reality Perth is a cosmopolitan, exciting city. Unfortunately, due to travel planning and one difficulty after another, I wasn’t able to see much of it before I left for the southwest coast. [read on]

The truck driver pulled up to the house early in the morning, before sunrise at 6am. I was already awake and showered, since I couldn't sleep with such anticipation. Annette told me that he wanted to get a really early ... [Continue reading this entry]

I have added new photos to my smugmug homepage in the Australia gallery. The link is under my links on the right hand side of the page. They are up to yesterday's date, my first 6 weeks in Australia. I'm off ... [Continue reading this entry]