Travel Memories:
Two of the 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean Road

Pretty picture! I’ll admit, that mostly inspired this post. The ocean reminds of blown Murano glass in Venice , Italy and nature purposefully highlighted the scene with a sizable dose of redish-orange limestone (two colors opposite on the color-wheel and therefore complimentary :). My tour guide on the Great Ocean Road shared all kinds of facts and stories, with a handful of local lore thrown in for good measure, but it was this drive’s likeness to the another beautiful road …

The visibility at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia was fantastic the weekend I chose for my Cairns live-aboard dive trip. The clear blue waters perfectly highlighted the vibrantly colored fish and diverse coral. This was my first diving after my getting my divers certification and it set the bar very high for the dives to come on the rest of my round the world travels.

Travel Memories:
The Three Sisters in Australia’s Blue Mountains

You can’t actually smell the sweetly mentholated scent eucalyptus when you’re already up in the mountains but the blue haze for as far as you can see is your first indication that the forests in the Blue Mountains north of Sydney contain such a high density of  eucalyptus trees that they the air is blue with tiny droplets of eucalyptus oil.
To this day – and even though I have been hiking in the Himalayas of Nepal, volcanoes in Guatemala and countless other places …

Here’s a fun fact you may have never known – when you push a car out of deep sand, you can actually fall on your face once the car starts moving.
Fun fact.
I’m all for women power – ra ra, equality, ra ra – but that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that there are times men come in handy. Instance number one when it’s nice to have a man around?
When you’re on Fraser Island (on Australia’s East Coast) and your huge 4WD vehicle is mired deep into incredibly …

So there I am, a year ago today, sweaty, sand is in every single possible crevice of my body, the cake I bought completely melting all over the makeshift table, and yet the moment is precisely right as twenty-four backpackers serenade me with the Happy Birthday song in six different languages.
We were all on a three day camping/driving/sandy adventure of Fraser Island, Australia (more on that tomorrow) and as my luck would have it I was hitting the quarter of a century mark. Birthdays on the road are a …

Images of Christmas traditionally evoke thoughts of a toasty log cabin with a flickering fire and cup of hot chocolate all while the snow quietly falls outside. Perhaps there’s even a twinkling Christmas tree nestled in the corner. Well, that’s not the case in Florida -it was 82 F here last week (about 60 F now)– but, you know, at least it is winter here!
Last year I found myself in the Southern Hemisphere for Christmas – Australia to be more exact. The sun was baking down outside and it was, …

Huddled under one lone awning in the middle of the Outback, as the rain poured down around us, we all looked forlornly at the broken down tour bus while Jess presented us with a choice:

admit defeat and return to the previous night’s campground near Uluru
head a couple hours down the road toward Kings Canyon in hopes that the river hadn’t overflowed – if it hadn’t we could hike the Canyon in the morning.

At this …

Rain alternated between a deluge and a misty-drizzle the entire first day on our Outback tour – and incredible luck meant we not only witnessed the waterfalls on Uluru (Ayres Rock), but also, a briefly visible rainbow as the last light of the day lit the rock a glowing orange.
On the flip side though, the rain also meant that we missed hiking Kata Juta, we were often stuck inside the bus for incredibly long periods of time, our guide had to beg for tents instead of swags (open-to-the elements canvas …