Day Workers Only - Sign on Door of Former Dairy

Once past childhood, I always aspired to be one of those people who did spiffy work during the daytime hours and who slept soundly at night. But for whatever genetic reason (thanks, Gran!), I have been a night owl all of my life.

I’ll be editing for the next few days — but I have already set up a separate page for PHOTOGRAPHY and the tab is at the top of the page.

Since the site is going to end up being so much more graphics heavy, I decided to discard the previous WordPress theme with the cute but cartoonish ocean ship and stick with something a bit more straightforward. And if I get bored with this one I’ll simply change it again!

Keep watching — there’s a lot more on the way.

So my learning curve this week has been to get a better handle on two programs — one a watermarking program so that I could post my photos online with a clear copyright symbol — the other Adobe Lightroom. I had gotten quite comfortable with the programs on my old Windows desktop, but now I am stretching the ‘little gray cells’ because I moved to a MacBook Pro a few months ago.

Slowly, slowly (sigh!) I am getting the hang of both of them and will be sending links to new photo archives in the coming days. Wish me luck!

Boy On The Bridge, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia

My apologies for the lack of updates lately, but the reasons are many and varied and include the new release of one book and a release of a 3rd edition of another one plus lots of other writing assignments.

We finally have the darling house on the market, but the prep stages prior to listing took SO much longer than we had expected and had us quite frazzled. Now I can happily report that we have begun packing books and deciding what furniture to keep while we wait for the agent to work his magic and I will be contacting ticket agents in the next week for preliminary pricing.

Since I am shifting back to journalism and photojournalism, I will be uploading articles and photo essays as often as I can while still ticking off items on the moving to-do list. It’s going to be a finely tuned balancing act!

But there will be exciting new places to examine, new people to meet, and new events to cover in the coming months and I am quite looking forward to those challenges. Big Old World — here we come again!

Flinders Street Railway Station - Melbourne

Coming up over the next few weeks — City Breaks and Country Jaunts in Victoria, Australia.

Watch for them!

Lakeside in Daylesford, Victoria

There are so many ways to make travel viable, enjoyable, and relaxing — but for me personally, rather none of that involves travelling via airplanes nowadays since I am not one of those gilded creatures with access to a private jet and Business Class is not an option for our budget. From overcrowded planes to overzealous ‘security’ measures to unexpected volcanic eruptions, for many of us travel by air has become either drudgery or dreaded or both.

During the week of Christmas, my husband and I took a much needed 5 days away from our normal life in a small village in Central Victoria in Australia. We travelled back to Melbourne, a marvelous city that we formerly lived in until we moved up here for a ‘tree change’ (in contrast to the oft-desired Australian dream of a ‘sea change’) and the entire trip was an exercise in relaxation and ease.

After driving for a half an hour, we parked in the free parking lot, took our 2 pieces of small rolling luggage plus one tote bag, and entered the gorgeous old 1800s-era Ballarat train station.

Within 15 minutes of our arrival and ticket purchase, one of the clean and very new V-Line trains pulled up and we walked quietly aboard in an unhurried manner and found our seats. We each pulled out the book that we planned to read on the short journey and a mere 10 minutes later we were pulling away from the station.

Our part of Victoria is perched up on the Great Dividing Range and Melbourne is hundreds of metres lower, right at the edge of the harbour which faces Tasmania, so the descent via train is an interesting contrast in landscapes — interesting, that is, until you get to the flat, flat, dead-boring-flat western edges of the Melbourne metro area. Things perk up a bit visually once you get to the outside rim of Melbourne and begin to enter via the suburbs and the gritty but tantalising old industrial district.

One and a half hours from Ballarat to Melbourne in complete comfort and we arrived right on time at the Southern Cross Station.

If you are even remotely a fan of contemporary architecture, this is a stunning building with swooping waves for a roofline and it definitely has the ‘Melbourne vibe.’ There were lots of grumbles when it was under construction about how well it would fit into the cityscape, but it has certainly succeeded beautifully.

Strolling straight out of the station on that summer afternoon and into the surprisingly mild temperatures outside, we walked a mere 2 blocks before we crossed onto Collins Street and hopped aboard one of the Metlink trams. Minutes later we stepped off and walked the 1 and 1/2 blocks to the loft apartment that I had reserved for the holidays.

For 5 wonderful days we lived a very urban lifestyle — walking everywhere we needed to go most of the time, catching the occasional tram for longer distances, and never once missing our car. We felt happier, healthier, and more alive and it was actually quite hard to come back home.

Not once did we feel pressured or rushed or harrassed and that certainly is a stark contrast to the unfolding news from the USA that their TSA employees are making conditions nightmarish for anyone trying to fly in or out of the USA. For us there was no standing in long lines to check in luggage, no security folks rifling through our cases, no walking through scanners or being bodily frisked, and NO being made to feel like a criminal when all you are trying to do is get from Point A to Point B.

There is a growing movement in Europe away from taking bare bones and cheap airlines to and from various countries and there is a huge surge in train travel once again. Much of this is due to the stresses of air travel and the absurd overreaction to every single security ‘incident’ that provides spurious justification for treating each passenger on a plane as if they were a potential terrorist. The other pressing concern is that it is now acknowledged that all of those cheap flights have contributed to the destruction of the global environment and train travel produces a much lower carbon footprint.

I consider this embrace of the slower, more scenic, and less stress-producing options to be an enlightened approach to travel and, disasters like the snow-related Eurostar fiasco notwithstanding, rail travel still retains the more gentle and civilised feel of times gone by.

Now — if they would just bring back inexpensive around-the-world passenger ships. Those lovely old-fashioned things had scheduled meals and gentle entertainment, but rather a lot of time was spent sitting in a deck chair quietly observing the ocean or tucked away in some cozy spot reading a book. About the only way to find that sort of travel today is in the scaled down comfort of the handful of cabins available on freighter ships that deliver containers full of goods to global ports.

Still dreaming though — still planning.

(NOTE: All photos courtesy of wikipedia except for the V-line photo from www.vline.com.au)
(NOTE: This article was originally posted on the 21st of December 2009 on my other blog, Multiversal Musing under the title “Travel Can Be Fun If You Stay OFF The Planes!”)

We had a plan — sell our small acreage instead of building a house on it, put all of our household goods in storage, and go around the world whilst working in a variety of jobs and countries along the way. Then we’d come home to Australia and buy another house. Sounds pretty good, eh — pretty straightforward?

Life didn’t cooperate with our plans and the real estate listing expired with no sale. All of our ideas went on hold for awhile and we went back to our day to day life. But we never stopped dreaming of that big overseas trip — all the while enjoying several smaller ones around Australia.

Kangaroo Warning Sign in Tasmania

The village where we live in Central Victoria in Australia is a gorgeous and historical gold mining site from the 1800s and I’ll include pictures of some of our local sites in a future post. We’ve loved living here and we are currently in the final stages of construction, an addition actually, onto the little eco-cottage that we built on our wee farm. But as we come closer to completion, those plans and dreams have percolated to the surface again and we are back to planning the around the world trip.

We love Australia and our life and friends here — but it’s time for a change. There are lots of reasons including health issues — but the bottom line is that serious change is afoot and 2010 will be the year for the REALLY BIG TRIP!

I will update this site during the coming year as things progress towards departure.

But in the meantime, I will begin by posting stories from our travels around Australia — a beautiful and varied country that everyone should visit at least once during their lifetime. We have been very blessed to live here!