Travel and culture
There are several routes into Queensland from the Northern Territory but only one of them, the Barkly Highway, is paved. I had my sights set on the Plenty Highway, which cuts east off the Stuart a little way north of Alice, and heading towards Channel Country beyond that. Hailee was more inclined to stick to… Continue reading In Far North Queensland
Alright, let’s get this out of the way. This time the excuse is this: as we neared the far reaches of Australia’s east coast and with it, re-entered the orbit of my family and the last weeks of the trip, I had less and less time to sit down and punch out a post. When… Continue reading The Red Centre
Australia’s Northern Territory is shaped like a tombstone, its base lodged deep in the red central deserts and jutting up to touch exotically-named bodies of water like the Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The state’s human population mostly congregates along the Stuart Highway, a north-south spine of bitumen that links Darwin in the… Continue reading The Top End
By now, this drive around Australia has given Hailee and me a sort of immunisation against the power of a beautiful coastline. We’ve seen more white sand, dramatic cliffs, pounding waves and seawater the colour of Listerine than you could shake a snorkel at. Someday, I suspect poor Hailee will return to the fabled coasts… Continue reading The Gorge-ous Kimberley
Before I get into it this week, I’d like to take a moment and do something I’ve never done before. Over the years, this blog has collected a small following that, in places, even extends beyond my own circle of family and friends. Some of you leave comments from time to time, others drop in… Continue reading Perth to the Pilbara
I really, really wanted to like Esperance. This was our first proper town in Western Australia, a lonely outlier on the state’s southern coast. The name had a nice ring to it, a hissing rhythm when pronounced in Australian English. Esperance – it’s French for “hope,” named after a ship in the same expedition that… Continue reading Little Gnomes and Big Trees in the South West
The Nullarbor is more famous for the things that aren’t there than the things that are. There are no hills, for example. Nor are there many trees. There are no real towns to speak of, and very few bends in the road. This lack of things makes for a large (even by Australian standards) blotch… Continue reading The Nullarbor
So for the last six or seven months people have been asking Hailee and I, “what’s your plan?” To this we would rattle off a laundry list of people to visit and places to see along the east coast. We wanted to check out Tasmania. We had people to visit in Brisbane. We had to… Continue reading South Australia: We Finally Go West
In the years that I’ve kept this blog, I would say a majority of the posts start the same. This one is no different: I’m sorry I haven’t been posting. This time I think my excuses are reasonably good. In the past month or more I have been working on other projects (and even getting… Continue reading Western Tasmania and Escaping the Apple Isle
Frenchman’s Cap is a white mountain, made mostly of quartzite, in Tasmania’s southwestern wilderness. It doesn’t look like a Frenchman, or a cap, but apparently some convicts thought it did so that was that. On a clear day you can get a glimpse of it from the Lyell Highway as you cross the island from… Continue reading Hiking Frenchman’s Cap