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 …

We’re flashing back to Australia today – to Uluru most specifically. Fret not my friends, the stories of Ireland are not over, but there were a handful of neat experiences in Australia that I never got a chance to cover.
I’ll preface this entire post by saying that although I was on an organized tour and saw all of the major sites…the fact that it was raining made this one of the biggest (and wettest) of my Australia adventures. It’s not incredibly typical for it to rain for days on end …

We head back in time today to the east coast of Australia for a flashback to my questionably successful attempts to learn how to surf. Now, this post is not intended to startle and confuse my loyal readers, but at the time I skipped over a few places along the way when the blog got too behind real time.
So, we rewind the clock and land back on the sunny and incredibly touristy east coast of Australia to the surfing town of Byron Bay. I am game for just about …

I have come to a pretty clear conclusion from my four months of travel in Asia -the name Shannon is not common, normal, or in some cases, even comprehensible. It’s completely normal in the United States…and Ireland for that matter!…but Asia is a whole other story. I dare-say that the theme for my journey over the past seven months could be summarized as “The Changing Names of Shannon” or, perhaps even more appropriate:  “The Complete Bastardization of my Name.”
Where did this start you may ask? Well, in Australia actually. Shannon …