April 2010
25 posts
TTFN
I’ll be on Lizard Island until the 17th. Not sure what my internet access will be like, so I may not be able to post anything about Cairs/Cape Tribulation/Lizard ISland until after then. We’ll see. For now, it’s time to go or Alissa will get (even more) frustrated.
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Camping: Whitsunday Island National Park
After picking up Pat in Noosa Heads, having a leisurely lunch at Cafe Le Monde, we hit the road for a 1000km drive to Shute Harbour and our 7:00am departure for the Nari’s Beach campsite on Whitsunday Island. Sort of. First, we spent 20 minutes lost among the countless, nearly unmarked roundabouts of Noosa, trying to find our way to the Noosa Civic Shopping Centre, to pick up a cooler and...
March 2010
15 posts
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Pat
We picked up Pat in Noosa Heads, the day after we left Sydney. He’s also in the midst of an around the world odyssey; however, his journey is moving east and is focused almost exclusively on surfing. You can read about his trip here. He had just spent a week in Noosa for some sort of surfing festival, staying in a condo with a group of great lakes surfers from Michigan and Chicago. By...
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Sydney was a whirlwind of surf, sun and hardcore...
Day 1: Arrival — (Too Much) Fun In The Sun
I arrived at 8:30 on Saturday—meaning I had to wake up in Christchurch at 4:00am!!!—and met Alissa just past immigration at the baggage claim, where she had been waiting for almost two hours. We made it to our hostel, Bondi Backpackers, by 11:00am, despite being dropped off at the wrong hostel because we both thought we had booked at...
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I'm One Lucky A**hole or Reg & Max Walker: Genuine...
I shouldn’t be sitting in my tent now, writing this with the surf breaking in the background. If I weren’t the type of lucky a****** who s**** in his bed only to discover a gold brick beneath the sheets, then I would be on a beach about 30 kilometers away, waiting to pay a small fortune for an AA truck to pull my little red Carolla out of the hole I dug for it.
This story, like so many of mine,...
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Mt. Cook/Aoraki/White Horse Hill
I can hear the wind before I feel it shaking my tent, howling through the tall stand of trees on the far side of my tent. I brace for impact just before the wind squishes the side of my tent up against my sleeping bag. This gust is particularly vicious, ripping my tent’s rain cover away from the stake loosely securing it to the lee side of the tent, then pulling it back against the more...
Mt. Cook
The DOC (pronounced “dock” by the locals, short for Department of Conservation) campsite at Mt. Cook is a great place to kick things off if you’re camping the South Island of New Zealand with a car. It’s the perfect distance driving from Christchurch in the late morning, as the extremely helpful officer at the DOC office in Christchurch told me yesterday morning. The...
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Benovia Barrel Tasting & Dinner With Elizabeth
Sunday, March 7th was a beautiful day on San Francisco Bay. The sun was shining through clear blue skies and the weather was unseasonably warm. Unfortunately, the day started with a minor crisis. MY college buddy, Matt, was set to arrive the next day and we were to depart for Squaw Valley early Tuesday morning… or so I thought. When I got out of bed Sunday morning, I went to check on...
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Christchurch
I landed in Christchurch, NZ this morning. After seeing a few sites, tending to a few errands (including hitting an internet cafe because data doesnt seem to work on my iPhone here… damn) I will be leaving for a DOC campsite at Mt Cook to spend the night.
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Must. Get. To. Bed.
I need to be out the door by 7:30 tomorrow morning to catch a flight for Vancouver, so I really ought to be alseep already, yet I feel compelled to blast Deadmau5 on repeat and bang out another blog entry, so here we are.
I’m still on the first leg of my journey, barely a week in, and yet it already feels incredibly eventful. Highlights of the trip so far: near-death accident on I80 in...
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