We wanted to spend our last couple of days in Australia in the Hervey Bay and Fraser Island area (which is just north of Brisbane) but that made for some pretty hard driving to make our way out of the interior and back to the coast. DH took on her role as navigator with a suitable amount of gusto- she had two or three maps opened up (although the city map of Bangkok created some confusion), and she was charting our progress by tracing her finger along the highlig...

Rather than backtrack along the costal highway we wanted to head inland and see a little bit of the Queensland Outback (and spot some Roos in the wild). Having our very own Spaceship allowed us to stop and look around at any point the urge hit us. We tracked a Platypus (unsuccessfully) along a creek in Yungabura, photographed the world's most photographed tree, the Curtain Fig, in a nearby forest, we wandered through the "best mining museum in the southern he...

It wasn't as tough maneuvering a Spaceship along the wrong side of the road as I thought it might be and we made our way north along the coast almost incident free until we arrived in the heart of Cape Tribulation. Along the way we learned that it was something of an obligation to wave at anyone else we saw driving a Spaceship, and it was equally important to not wave at those driving any other rental vehicle (of course, the Grey Nomads wandering all through ...

Rather then return to Brisbane we opted to re-enter Oz through Cairns and it took just a couple of small plane adventures to deliver us back into the hands of Australian officials. In a moment of Deb B shopping madness, I had picked up a huge carving during our Sepik River travels, largely because it seemed to be such a good bargain. It's much too big to be easily carried through the rest of our travels, we don't even have a house to display it in, and to...

The word must have gotten out that we were getting outstanding service from Air Canada staff and that urgent call to corrective action resulted in spilled tea on one side of my shirt, coffee on the other, and some sort of chocolate brownie on my pant leg. Along with a bruised elbow from a runaway food cart, balance had been restored, and my AC service expectations had been successfully dialed back to mediocre. Throw in a baby a couple of rows back who set some so...