What Makes Me Laugh

  On the flight back to America, I collected a few more travel tips to share with my savvy readers. If there is one universal law about life I think it’s that you learn the best lessons the hard way.   Travel Tip #4: Clothes expand in your suitcase It’s a fundamental law of traveling. [...]

I know, I know, I’m back from my trip, and you all are waiting for me to be done writing about Australia, but I have a couple more posts to share before I mentally return to the U S of A. This is a collection of signs we spotted on our trip that made us [...]

I was going to call this post, “The Last Supper” and then I realized just how inappropriate that would be on Good Friday. On our final day in Tasmania and our final night in Australia, we sampled some of the best that the country has to offer. The best rainforest in Tasmania has to be [...]

So I went to see an astrologist. Once. In December, when I was hoping she could tell me for sure when winter would end in Montana. Seriously, I went to her to make sure my psychic was accurate. Does that make me a flake? Probably, but she was right about my trip to Australia. She accurately [...]

One of my favorite New England yarns from Doug is a story about a tourist who stops at a little town in Maine to ask for driving directions. He sees an old Mainer sitting outside a coffee shop and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Bangor?” The Mainer looks at him, and [...]

Travel Tip #3: When seakayaking, make sure you choose someone besides your spouse for a partner. After our adventures in southeast Australia, we drove up the coast to Freycinet (pronounced Frayseenay) National Park, one of the most gorgeous places on earth. Imagine turquoise water, white sand beaches, exotic forests, mountains made up of jumbled granite [...]

Travel Tip #2: Boats shouldn’t have seat belts The art of taking risks is personal. I’m afraid of spiders, Hannah is afraid of snakes, and Doug is a little afraid of missing the last ferry off the island. Today I had about 15 minutes of pure, intense fear — the kind of fear where you [...]

  Landing in Tasmania was like coming home. I could feel a cool breeze, I could see trees that if you squinted might look similar to the ones in Montana, and there were mountains in the distance.      It’s odd to fly nearly 10,000 miles and feel at home. You think that marathon travel [...]

    After four days of bratwurst, schnitzel, Kuchen, and bee stingers (a cake), we were ready for some normal, non-faux-German items on menus again. Hannah arrived in Hahndorf just in time to try and hunt for something approaching a vegetable in town, and since we had an early departure for Tasmania the next day [...]

  This trip has been filled with good people. Perhaps that is the best part of traveling — meeting people who may be thousands of miles from your geographic world, but very close to you in spirit.      With sadness, we bid adieu to Pam, our Jurlique host, and Jude and Libby, our fellow [...]