Geo: 32.7157, -117.162Apologies for the gap between postings but as our followers know, once DH found out that there was going to be a retirement party for her back in Toronto (and there was going to be gifts and a piper), we had to interrupt our world trip and return post haste. There was also the small manner of selling our home of 17 years as well as selling off the remainder of our belongs that had survived our original purge.Once we were formally evicted from our home by the new owners, we set up shop in a local B&B (which was actually just a B since Carl would be up all night chasing the local girls around the bar, and couldn't get up in time to prep any breakfast).DH had already completed her goodbye tour ... read more

Geo: -18.2763, 144.602Rather than backtrack along the costal highway we wanted to head inland and see a little bit of the Queensland Outback (and spot some Roos in the wild). Having our very own Spaceship allowed us to stop and look around at any point the urge hit us. We tracked a Platypus (unsuccessfully) along a creek in Yungabura, photographed the world's most photographed tree, the Curtain Fig, in a nearby forest, we wandered through the "best mining museum in the southern hemisphere" in Herberton (convincing ourselves in the process that there must be a significant shortage of mining museums in the southern hemisphere) as well as a really nice heritage village in the same town.As we powered our Spaceship along increasingly isolated roads the topology changed dramatically and although we weren't in the Outback highlighted ... read more

Geo: -16.9254, 145.775Rather then return to Brisbane we opted to re-enter Oz through Cairns and it took just a couple of small plane adventures to deliver us back into the hands of Australian officials. In a moment of Deb B shopping madness, I had picked up a huge carving during our Sepik River travels, largely because it seemed to be such a good bargain. It's much too big to be easily carried through the rest of our travels, we don't even have a house to display it in, and to top it off, we now had to run the gauntlet of the same Australian Customs that took a dim view of my unopened potato chip bag the first time we crossed swords (they have a legendary reputation in PNG for confiscating wood products). After completely unwrapping ... read more

Geo: -3.56519, 143.62After days on the Sepik River there's no way I was going back to the Airport Lodge in Wewak to clean up for our trip to Madang so we stayed at the Talio Lodge. The enterprising dude who owned this facility had pimped out a number of shipping containers that you would normally find dockside or on an ocean traveling freighter. Never having slept in a shipping container before this seemed to be something of a must-do. The attached restaurant (made from a much bigger shipping container) even served a blue slushee drink which sealed the deal for me.You could fly to Madang via Port Moresby but we had heard that there was a 'freighter' that worked the north coast of PNG that was going to Madang the next day. Never having traveled via ... read more

Geo: -3.56519, 143.62We had met a couple from Germany while attending the festival who were trying to put together a few days on the Sepik river so we arranged to join them if we could find transport to Wewak. This proved difficult as the only way to reach Wewak was via air and the exodus after the festival had chewed up all of the available seats. We did contact MAF, the airline run by missionaries in PNG, and while they did not fly according to any schedule, they were "thinking" about flying to Wewak on the Monday as we required but the plane was being "repaired" over the weekend??Apparently they were able to glue the wing back on, because when we showed up first thing Monday morning they were pretty certain they'd be flying at some ... read more