Nobody believes me when I say that the 80 days thing is a coincidence. But it is.
We leave the day after Isabel's last exam and return the day before the first full day of school. 80 days.
Actually from take off to touch down at Winnipeg International is 79 days and 20 hours, but door to door from our house... precisely 80 days.

And a bit about the backstory. In 1993 after three years in veterinary practice Lorraine and I quit our jobs and backpacked around the world for eight months, doing everything from living in a cave in Greece (a very nice cave mind you) to camel trekking across the Rajastani desert to celebrating Christmas in Hong Kong to island hopping in Thailand to volcano climbing in Indonesia to living with a family in Samoa to... well, the list does go on and on. Everyone said, "Wow, that was the trip of a lifetime!" To which we responded, "Nooo! It can't be the only time we do that! It just can't be." We swore we would do something similar again when we had kids. It's 22 years later. Isabel is 13. Alexander is 10.
It's time.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Days 8 & 9 Welcome To The Jungle

I woke this morning to the sound of oddly subdued roosters and the sound of light rain on the fibreglass roof of the motorhome. I stepped outside into a world of green. Fifty paces from the campsite a trail plunged into the jungle. I stepped into a David Attenborough Planet Earth documentary. The crowing roosters (by way of explanation, the campground was  stocked with a pleasing array of barnyard animals) were replaced by a dozen strange birdcalls. The sound of rain on the motorhome was replaced by the sound of rain on the jungle canopy, not a drop making it to the ground. The green enveloped me, so dense and so intense that I could easily imagine that one could get lost for days in a single acre. By "one" I mean "I"; others may be less spastic.

We were on the Atherton Tableland, an Eden of not only jungle, but of incredibly fertile small farms, cute villages, ancient hippies and... wait for it... platypuses. Those of you who have seen the giant inflatable platypus in my basement know that I have an intense, some would say unhealthy, relationship with the creature. Consequently it has been high on my life list to see The Platypus in the wild. We had passed some parks guaranteeing platypus viewing but in these it was apparent that The Platypus was being held against His will for the pleasure of tourists. It was my wish that He (or She) be viewed in the wild and free. We stared at the water for a very long time. No platypus. We came back the next day. Again, staring for a very long time. This time... platypus! He revealed Himself! It was an astonishing and deeply fulfilling sight.

On to the Outback now, 3000 km to Darwin.

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