Australia, The Great Adventure

Archive for January, 2008

I had a dream recently…

We were holidaying in a large yacht - it was the first night and we were tied up at a jetty. The next morning I was looking through the porthole and watching other yachts and ships going past - then one was sailing past quite close, but moving really slowly, and I thought, “Hang on, I think we are moving too!”. And I went up on deck and noticed that we were drifting along backwards, along the shoreline. And the shore consisted of a lot of rock shelves - some semi-submerged. And somehow we weren’t crashing into the rocks, even though it looked like we should be at any moment.

Ben Groundwater has explored the question of “why we travel” in the travel blog on The Age. After considering the curiosity, the food, the buzz and the romance, he narrows it down to one word: people.

The people are what make a destination. There’s only so much joy you can get from nice scenery, amazing wildlife, or good food. In the end, you have to talk to the locals, and that’s what will decide whether you’ve had a good trip or not.

Darned good reason, I figure.

We are currently in a rental house. Therefore when we leave, we will no longer have a residential address. I guess that means that we will officially be of “no fixed address”!

We have a post office box (through my company), and we can get this mail forwarded to another address (ie. a relative’s address). Then we could get the mail forwarded to a post office near where we are going to be.

I am contacting the various different organisations that we deal with, that may need to know our physical address, to find out how they would like to deal with this.

One of the big concerns in my mind is - how are we going to fit everything we need into the car / trailer / whatever we end up travelling in? Even if we just go for an overnighter the car is packed to the gills - boot full, kids in the back seat with their legs sticking straight out because all of the foot space is full up, passenger in the front with their legs all twisted sideways to fit in between the bags there…

So it was with more than a little interest and a slight glimmer of hope that I stumbled across Doug Dyment’s site OneBag.com. As he says,

The name doesn’t sound so good, but this swamp at the bottom of a sinkhole provides a fascinating day out. Read this description from the Tasmanian State Government website:

Explore four pathways through Dismal Swamp and open your eyes and your mind to the mystery of life at the bottom of a giant sinkhole.

You never know what you might find on the fascinating journey that unfolds as you descend 40 metres from the Visitor Centre on the sinkhole rim into a world where the spirit of nature and the creativity of Tasmanian artists come together.

I have a feeling that the National Public Toilet Register could be useful to us as we travel. It is a national government initiative, which, as stated on the website, shows the location of more than 14,000 public and private public toilet facilities across Australia. Details of toilet facilities can also be found along major travel routes and for shorter journeys as well. Useful information is provided about each toilet, such as location, opening hours, availability of baby change rooms, accessibility for people with disabilities and the details of other nearby toilets.

Sometimes you just gotta go!

The Gunns Plains Cave State Reserve (more information can be found in the Wikipedia article) in Tasmania’s north, contains an underground network of 154 known caves under the Gunns Plains farmlands. They run 45 minute tours into the spectacular caves.

Sourced from Tasmania’s North West, Your Regional Guide to 2008

Billed as the world’s largest maze complex, just out of Sheffield in Tasmania’s north, Tasmazia boasts a lavender farm, a miniature town, a gift shop and a pancake kitchen, and of course, lots of mazes, eight in all. They have the ‘Great maze’ (a traditional hedge maze), the Hampton Court maze, the Hexagonal maze, the Confusion maze, the Balance maze, the Cage maze, the Yellow Brick Road maze and the mysterious Irish maze.

Sourced from Tasmania’s North West, Your Regional Guide to 2008