A 10 hour flight and a five hour time change later, we find ourselves in an incredible place like no other…Dubai. We’ve transported ourselves from the land of OZ, to the land of shopping, opulence, outrageous construction projects, and the Muslim religion. Each morning at about 5 AM, the call to prayer is heard across the city courtesy of the many mosques. We get up and open the window to hear the chanting from the loudspeakers. It’s the signal for all worshippers to get ready to face the east and pray. The chanting only lasts about five minutes, but we enjoy [View Full Entry]

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After a train ride through the most desolate parts of this large island-continent, it was good to be back in a large city again. We are both admittedly city dwellers, but certainly don’t mind venturing out into the lesser populated regions. Perth is a city of almost 1.5 million people. If you looked at a map, spotted Perth and looked at its latitude, you would notice it was at about 32 degrees give or take a few degrees and minutes. Then, if you headed west on that same parallel until you hit land again, you would have to go all the [View Full Entry]

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Indian Pacific Railway- Sydney to Perth In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, “ I hear that train a comin’, comin’ down the track……. It was time to ride the rails and take a good long look at some of the most remote parts of this large country. We have had the most wonderful adventure taking the Indian Pacific Railway all the way across Australia. The 4,352km (2700miles) transcontinental journey between Sydney and Perth is one of the longest and most fascinating train journeys in the world. It also contains over 300 miles of the longest straight stretch of [View Full Entry]

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Hello, hello, hello! Great news, we have a new camera and so far we like it a lot. It has a great zoom on it. I’m sure it will take us a little while to get comfortable with it so please bear with us. Sydney is as spectacular as you can see from the photos. It is one of the Great cities of the World!! The Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are outstanding!! What a beautiful city. It is very cosmopolitan and diverse. This city is full of life and crazy drivers on narrow streets. Speaking from experience, it is [View Full Entry]

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Ugh! We have just realized that our camera is starting to go out on us. This camera has been with us for more than a few adventures, but we’re afraid that it’s tired and the photos will prove that. This group of photos will be marginal at best. We’ve already bought another camera and promise stunning pictures for the next blog. We are not sure where all the flies have gone but we have not run into many on this part of the coast. It is so wonderful!!! Anyway……we have previously mentioned in our blogs that once in a while we [View Full Entry]

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G’day Mate, here we are in Queensland, which is called the Sunshine State. Does that sound like Florida? There are some sunny similarities. Take a glance at an Australian map. We’re starting the next part of our trip on the northeast coast of Australia… Port Douglas to Hervery Bay. In all honesty, it was good to flee the heat of Alice Springs and head to something more palatable weather-wise. It “only” goes up to about 30 or 31 degrees in Cairns. That’s 86 degrees for you Yankees. Sure it’s humid, but after 106 degree heat, this is almost cozy! [View Full Entry]

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It is easy to forget how big and diverse Australia really is. Although it is technically a continent, it might be easy just to think of it as a large island when you cursively glance at it on a map. The fact is it’s a continent and is not that dissimilar in size to the United States. The U.S. however, has about 275 million more people. An example of this is we boarded our plane in Melbourne early one Monday morning and it was about 65 degrees. We flew for 2 ½ hours and stepped off our plane in Uluru (Ayers [View Full Entry]

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We’re back on the mainland of Australia after having taken a 6 AM flight from Hobart to Melbourne which included getting on the wrong bus and having to run to catch the right one. With all our luggage in tow! It is good to laugh at ourselves. We arranged for a shuttle bus to the airport at 4:45 AM and they said they would pick us up around the corner from our hotel. While we waited there, a shuttle pulled up in front of our hotel. We quickly brought our stuff back down there and loaded it on the bus. After [View Full Entry]

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Hi Everyone! Thanks again for all of your wonderful e-mails. You don’t know how much we appreciate hearing from you. We’ve been on the road 178 days and out of our country for 115 days. We miss all of you and appreciate all of your e-mails and comments. Thanks for keeping in touch. We are very excited to tell you about our time in Tasmania. It is a beautiful island state just southeast of mainland Australia. We spent 7 days and it was over in a blink. We realize now that you could easily spend 3 or 4 weeks touring around [View Full Entry]

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Hello again from the South Island….. We’ve decided that scones are woefully underrated!!! New Zealand offers wonderful scones in most towns. We’ve decided that America needs more scones. It makes us long for our next door neighbor in Tampa-- Mildred always made the best scones!!! We also wanted to mention that it is a different experience being south of the equator. It is quite strange when we drive south and it gets colder—because we are going further away from that invisible meridian called the equator. This makes the north island of this nation the [View Full Entry]

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