Homeward bound

The sailing gods were not smiling on us this trip, and so the couple of days we had slotted for sailing were rained (and chilled) out. Bummer. Sailing is a mighty good time, and it's not often I get the chance to do it, so I had really been looking forward to it. Instead, we ended up playing a rather lively gameof canasta, and taking a very nice, if not damp, hike to a light house.
Tomorrow, thanks to the magic of airplanes, I will cross the pacific, the dateline and the equator all in a relatively short 29 hours! Even though this has historically taken months, historically they weren't confined to a plane seat size for midgets for 29 hours straight! The funny part is that thanks to being on the other side of the international date line, the clock will say that my arrival back home will only be 5 hours after I start!

Overall it's been a fantastic trip, with so many great people and places! I think I will have to go home and look at my pictures just to remember all the good times! Before I left, a friend who had spend some time down under described NZ and AU as being great 'practice countries' for traveling. To anyone within earshot of this blog would find the food, culture, transport systems and life in general here to be very familiar. So to anyone who has desire to travel to this part of the world, I say go without fear. The locals are very friendly, and most importantly, all the signs are in English! But there are few differences, some of which are pretty novel to a non-native.

Just to name a few: they put beetroot (aka sliced beets) on their hamburgers; they CHARGE extra for ketchup (or any other codiment for that matter); the DON'T use vinigar on their fish & chips; all their outlets have switches on them (see pic), although no one seems to know why; they say LOTS of different words like bowsers, mazzies, kazzies and all kinds of others, and ROUNDABOUTS! I have to give more detail about roundabouts (aka traffic circles) as they are a fantastic idea. I know they have made a push to start using them in the states, but to such a minor extent that you could manage to never see one. Here, they are EVERYWHERE. Imagine if they replaced 90% of the stoplights and every stop sign in the US with a roundabout. This is the setup here in UA. You would also replace all the time you spend sitting at stoplights with MOVING! Roundabouts work wonderfully! The only time you ever sit waiting in your car here is when you're at a light, the rest of the time you pause when you enter the roundabout, and off you go! Never any waiting! Genius!

Many many thanks to Ron, Angela and her family for their hospitality and gracious kindness to myself and Bayard! Also many thanks to everyone who helped us along the way, and to all of you out there in blog land for traveling along with us! Hope everyone is well and I will hopefully see some of you soon!