Tiffany and Greg Around the World
It’s time again for another foray into our tiki-style Christmas carol extravaganza!
This time with a little help / good natured tomfoolery from our friends Rod & Elizabeth, who we just happened to stumble across during a visit back to California…
(hey, what!? We all happened to both be back in CA at the same time? As we already told you all, in the sailing world it was just a matter of time and proximity.)
They were even nice enough to teach us that cold war Christmas classic…
There are rules and responsibilities that exist in every band of travelers. These range widely, even sometimes directly conflict, from group to group and can be as simple as “we switch off cooking dinner / doing the dishes every night” to “we only go out as a group so we can watch each other’s back” or even the hotly contested “we pay a little extra for creature comforts like AC” vs. “We live as cheaply as possible.”
Let’s go ahead and just table the “How is air conditioning OPTIONAL in the tropics?!” conversation until later.
Additionally many of these rules are unspoken, which can lead to confusion and occasionally unintentionally hurt feelings when one person violates another’s “unwritten rules.”
Unfortunately we ran afoul of such a situation with one of our traveling companions. A member of our group was, well, not in 100% agreement on what their responsibilities were to the rest of us and without any form of notice, started just slacking off from time to time and not pulling their weight…
(…or our weight either for that matter…)
There have been some…disagreements…of late.
Australia has a lot of coastline. It ranges from swampy marshes, to beautiful beaches, to craggy cliffs and everything in between. Victoria, in the southeastern part of the country, has miles of land that meets water. One of the most celebrated of those regions is the Great Ocean Road. We first heard about it in a travel magazine a few years ago, and Tiffany thought it looked gorgeous so we decided to check it out (via wine country of course! We’ll post more about that soon.)
Little did we know that this was…a thing…that one does. Drive the Great Ocean Road that is. It’s a thing…that Australians ask…if you’ve done. So consequently….
(Hey, who are we to say it’s not epic?)
In Australia, they don’t call it a “bull bar.” They call it a “roo bar”
And it seems like every vehicle over here has one.
And we wonder where they got the idea for Mad Max…
The first thing we did on our great Australian overland excursion was to (inadvertently!!) find out why this is so:
Today we cover two interesting and mostly unrelated facts.
1) Though literally miles from anywhere even slightly resembling civilization, Mt Kosciuszko is probably the only member of the 7 summits that has mobile phone reception.
Yep, up there. Best coverage in the area.
2) Greg’s self confidence most likely comes from his mother’s side of the family.
The last mountain we were on top of in the southern hemisphere had less cell phone coverage but more snarky commentary.
Greg and Tiffany are traveling around the world on sailing yachts and keep a video blog of their (mis)adventures. If sailing to Tahiti on a 44 ft sailboat, 3-day delays for wine tastings, getting pooped on by seagulls, opening coconuts with dull machetes, sailing past tornadoes and ukulele Christmas carols are for you, then check them out atwww.CoastGuardCouple.com!
Sure it’s not like it was freaking Everest or anything and yeah, it’s the smallest and kinda a part time member of the list but just for the record,
For our Thanksgiving festivities in Australia Tiffany made pumpkin pie.
Which, is kinda not a big deal right?
…until you realize that Australians are not familiar with the concept of putting pumpkins in a pie one would eat for dessert. That means no canned pumpkin to fill the pie.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic: They also don’t know what graham crackers are either so, consequently, no premade graham cracker crusts.
(how do you people LIVE!?!)
And just kinda figure out the rest.
Having developed a bit of confidence learning the fine art of falling down hills with spikes attached to our feet and discovering how much we actually kinda liked trudging over frozen tundra…
…we decided it would make a lot more sense just to drag our snowbaords to the top of a mountain and slide down that way.
With a total of 4 ski lifts to entertain us for 3 months it’s probably little wonder how that got old.
Luckily, our ski resort was smack dab in the middle of a national freaking park and our friend Chris volunteered to show us how to successfully get lost bush walking without killing ourselves.
Why is it still called bush walking when all the bushes are buried in the snow?
As we just talked about, the people of our home country have the privilege of choosing who will be arguably the most powerful person on the planet.
And yesterday we remembered one of the primary sources of that power:
The servantsContinue reading “The Servants”
