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 …

I almost overlooked Guatemala’s sweetest little river; running through the south and emptying into the Caribbean Sea the Rio Dulce is actually incredibly beautiful and reminiscent of the swampy waters of the Everglades in Florida (my home-state for inquiring minds). Thankfully these rivers are void of the pesky American Alligator and instead perfectly tranquil to better ensure several days of relaxing dockside and canoeing myself around the narrow canals shooting off of the river like tree branches from a tree trunk.

I really resisted my first few days relaxing on …

Mini pandemonium broke out as six of us teetered on a jaggedly tiny ledge of dried volcanic lava – although the top surface of the lava was hard and quite solid under our feet, the heat radiating from every single crevice of the charred gray rock had me feeling like a pot roast in a slow cooker.
Standing nearby was our guide – and though he had just ungracefully deposited six of us here, perching on a lookout spot that you pretty much need help to jump onto, he …

Traveling is all about pushing boundaries – you try new foods that you’d never dream of sampling, tackle adventures that sound just a bit intimidating and jump off that rope swing that really doesn’t “have your name written all over it” …and yes, I am talking pretty specific on that last one.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll start the tale of my day at the Semuc Champey waterfalls with this:
I prep for my daring jump off of the rope swing:
The massive bruise that formed less than …

You know how that phrase “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry?”
Yeah, that about sums up most of my time in Belize and my major plans for the country.
I have read absolutely fabulous things about the diving in Belize. The Blue Hole has been on my bucket list for quite some time and the country boasts the second largest barrier reef in the world – sounded great!
But then a series of events forced me to completely abandon these plans and eventually just bail from the …

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 …

My nearly year of traveling around the world had to end at some point – check out the first installment of my RTW route through Australia, Thailand Laos and Cambodia, the second installment through India, Nepal and Italy before tuning in for stories and an outline of the last four months around the world:
June ‘09: Croatia’s Parks to Bosnia’s Quiet Charm & Slovenia’s Theatre
June started off with a few transportation problems on the way to Croatia, but all of that was forgiven as we camped out in a …

It’s really hard to believe that this week exactly a year ago I was well into my around the world trip and diving on the Great Barrier Reef – and right now, a year later the RTW trip is over. Instead, I’m plopped on my bed in my childhood home working hard to save up the cash I’ll need for Central America in February.
With a new travel plans in the works, for posterity’s sake let’s recap my RTW travel route and some of the more interesting adventures. We’ll do …