I saw my travel agent Gina this morning to select Singapore Airlines flights from Brisbane to London and Frankfurt back to Brisbane. I opted for premium economy, which is only available from Singapore to Europe, but not from Brisbane to Singapore or vice versa. Singapore’s schedule is ideal for me, particularly when I spend a night at the Crowne Plaza at Changi Airport. I can do pretty well the entire flight to London in daylight. The return from Frankfurt is overnight, but the flight to Brisbane is in daylight, arriving early in the evening. Gina booked the seats. I’m faced with filling a gap between my time in London and Somerset – rail travel being the obvious choice.

This is a year when I am due to visit the UK and Europe. I plan to leave early in July. I checked with Clive to find out if he is up to a visit by me and when would best suit him. He is conducting his Finnish retreat in July this year, instead of September, which rather threw me. He needs some recovery time before I appear, so I opted for arriving in Somerset on July 21. I will have to jiggle my timing around a bit when I book my flights.

I flew to Longreach on October 7 prior to my road trip with Simon and Nicole. I was delighted to see a pair of kangaroos grazing on the neighbour’s lawn when I arrived at their house, something I hadn’t seen before. The itinerary included Blackall, Charleville, Tambo, Quilpie, Eromanga and Jundah. Most of the tour was in far southwest Queensland. The terrain from Tambo to Welford National Park near Jundah was all new to me, though there is a good deal more country in the State, further south and west. The grass was still long in the paddocks and we saw cattle and a few sheep enroute, but the ground is drying out and el nino has taken hold. The rivers still had quite a lot of water in them, but the water courses we traversed were overwhelmingly dry. Compared with my last visit in late March, there was plenty of road kill, a sure sign that food beyond the road verges, is more difficult to obtain for kangaroos and emus.

This was the first time in five or six visits to Simon & Nicole, that it hasn’t rained in Longreach. I relished the near 40° heat.  On the… Read Complete Text

On reflection, I should have done this trip ten years ago, yet I simply didn’t want to go to the USA, and even now, I had no wish to travel there other than to see some of its legendary wild places. But with time running out and United Airlines having recently introduced a non-stop service between San Francisco and Brisbane, I set aside my aversion to the USA’s crazy politics, gun violence and tipping as a cynical excuse for not paying people properly, and, with muted enthusiasm, booked my journey. I departed on June 9 and returned on June 27. I became apprehensive about whether I would manage the hiking tour and how much money I would need for tips, so much so that on the morning of my departure, I acquired a severe pain in my left hip which made ascending the stairs difficult and unpleasant. My immediate thought was whether I would have to abandon the trip before it began. My next thought was to wonder if the pain was muscular or skeletal. Fortunately, it abated as the day wore on, which encouraged me to undertake the overnight flight.

SAN FRANCISCO

My ambivalence about travelling… Read Complete Text