Angela cheerfully collected me from the bus station after I mistakenly told her to be there an hour-and-a-half earlier. I did not ask the fifty-three year-old much; she was already doing enough to help me. I was prepared to walk down the road for a while for dinner, a concern at such a late hour since restaurants in Australia close so early. Instead she prepared me a hot meal of chicken, rice, and potatoes, which I hungrily gobbled up. “You’ll be sleeping in the den, out in the back. Follow me.” It was a dark, dreary, and chilly night in Launceston. She led me out in the direction of a faded campervan, in her backyard so long it had taken roots into the soil. But for one thin set of white Christmas lights on a naked ... read more

Never have I traveled so far and been so close to home. It is a country town of one million plus with a few skyscrapers. It would be unfair, even rude to say that the best thing anyone could do in Adelaide is leave. South Australia’s humdrum capital is in desperate need of the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s because I pulled into town in the middle of the winter. Perhaps it has more to do with being a nine-to-five city that rolls up its sidewalks to dismiss the workforce back to its lofty and leafy suburbs. The city council of Hartford, Connecticut could apply to be a sister city with Adelaide. In terms of liveliness, my capital city never looked so vibrant. Hartford’s social ills give it an excuse. In Adelaide, it’s TGIM (‘M’ ... read more

The fuel gauge read over two thirds. All I needed to do was get to the next town. According to my road map, there was a gas station one hundred ninety kilometers away. I started out and only cast a limited glance at the gas station. Soon enough it and Cobar were a disintegrating dot in my rearview mirror. Ahead of me lay four hundred sixty kilometers of hostile, arid, and stunted wilderness. Oncoming vehicles make their presence known every ten or fifteen minutes. The only ones westbound are diesel trucks making deliveries to outlying communities. Itching to reach Broken Hill by mid afternoon, I opened up the four cylinder engine; no obstacles, vehicular or animal, would get in my way. Once out of town, there are no speed cameras to photograph offenders. At one hundred ... read more

He finally got his wish. Even when I told him where I was going to spend the better part of the month, he found a way to inject an element of trepidation into my veins as though it might force me to reconsider. In years past, conversations between us with something to the effect of: “Why won’t you consider it? It’s a big place, lots to do, and the folks are very friendly.” My father would then squint in anticipation of the answers he knew were coming and did not want to hear. “No, Dad, there’s just no challenge. There’s no edge.” If he was trying to direct me back into Western Europe, I had an easy out. A summer or significant portion thereof in Europe would destroy my budget in a matter of weeks. Only ... read more

“Hey, Rich, wanna a Beerita?” A what? I deduced what Felicia had asked me, but I asked her about its contents anyway. Zack’s newly married twenty-two-year-old daughter put the transparent plastic pitcher down and rattled off the primitive recipe, perfectly suited for a tank-top-and-swimming-trunks crowd on a Fourth of July weekend. In order to count, her eyes shot up into the upper right of her sockets and she recalled, “Let’s see…three beers,” all out of a can and unquestionably awful, “one can of concentrate,” whatever that is, “and one can of tequila.” Wait, tequila comes in a can? After a pause, “Oh, and some limes, of course.” She poured me a dose of the concoction. As I took a look around, Phillip was already splashing feet first into the lake, having fallen in love with the ... read more