Tiffany and Greg Around the World
There are those things you hear about but you assume the chances of them happening to you are just so scarce as to not even give it much thought. Then, of course, it happens to you.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s start at the hotel.
We managed to find a really nice place to stay for the few weeks we were on the beaches of Bali. But “nice” has a lot of different meanings when you talk about international destinations…
Throughout our journey, many of our friends and family members have been concerned about how dangerous it can be to travel. Obviously we all know that some things are inherently safe like staying at an all inclusive resort and never leaving the property.
You can stay in your shell like this hermit crab in Fakarava.
And some things are inherently unsafe (think standing on a dark street corner in Tijuana) when it comes to traveling.
One can presume that it only gets worse when the sun goes down. petracross
[fgallery id=16 w=450 h=385 t=0 title=”The Great Australian Road Trip Continues guest starring Chris”]
Now we’re off to the Tropical North and joining us for our Road Trip is Tiffany’s brother Chris.
Chris came out to work with us in Australia when we got him a job at Charlotte’s Pass Ski Resort. He had a month left before he needed to head back to the US.
So after reclaiming The Beast from hibernation we asked…
Us: “So, chris, now that we’re done snowboarding in New South Wales where ya wanna go?”
Continue reading “The Great Australian Road Trip Continues, guest starring Chris”
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,
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?
Sydney is…
Well…
…Anti-climatic.
And now a brief interlude from our normally scheduled blogging.
Greg’s sister and her husband live in London and we had the good fortune to be able to join them for their 5th wedding anniversary.
But come on, it’s right here. Right freaking here. Breathing down our necks…
How many times in life will we just happen to stumble across an Olympic games in progress?
And, the questions we were more interested in:
- What don’t the TV cameras show us?
- How do the locals experience the games?
We have, to a degree, made light of the titanic forces that shaped and continue to mold this tiny island nation within the South Pacific’s ring of fire. We don’t do this out of lack of respect; simply out of acceptance of how very small we as humans are before the fury of Mother Nature.
As people who have lived in Northern California and Southern Florida we have learned to live with the fact that a natural disaster could just up and kill us at any given moment and there is, in the end, precious little we can do about it. Coming from the San Francisco Bay people ask Greg what they should do if there is an earthquake. His response,
“The truth of it is that if you actually have enough time to realize that an earthquake is what’s happening, you have more than likely already survived it.”
Christchurch Cathedral
Before the 2nd quake – taken by us
After the quake – thanks to wikipedia
That knowledge, mixed with our unapologetic and absolute love of this country, made the fate of Christchurch weigh heavily on our minds as we prepared to depart New Zealand.
Mt. Aspiring National Park, NZ
Another aspect of friendship is the joint lexicon a group develops over time. Shared experiences become stories, stories become jokes, jokes become catchphrases and so on until it gets to the point where simply mentioning the last name of a high school teacher will bring smirks, smiles or groans of anguish from the right circle of people while making absolutely no sense to anyone else.
The longer one stays with a given group, the more detailed this secret language becomes. By extrapolation, one can easily concede that in 11+ years of exclusive relationship (8+ of actual marriage) quite an expansive vocabulary would develop. We bring this up, dear friends, to issue you fair warning:
If either of us ever describe an activity you are about to join us on as “Kiwi moderate” run away quickly.
We have no other way to describe it. “gods” seems too presumptuous for monotheists and “demi-gods” too second-rate. “Champions” too sporty and “giants” too dependent on physical proportions.
Google software engineers, F-16 fighter pilots, world-class preachers, property barons, lawyers and teachers, real-life Coast Guardsmen rescue personnel that make Kevin Costner look like a pansy (and the guy who actually did the stunts for him in the movie), freewheeling gypsies, ivy league college grads & PhDs, internet millionaires, global circumnavigating sailors, national level speakers and coaches, songwriters, sales directors who spend their free time climbing the ice encrusted peaks of Colorado, proud parents of beautiful, intelligent children the list goes on…
These are not people who we hope to someday become, or observe in awe from a distance and pray might deem us good enough to network with. These are the people with whom we drink beer and play Dungeons and Dragons. (Well, some of them. The rest are more into video games. We mix it up.)
Of course, they aren’t all those things to us. Usually they have first names and are, in general, rather humble about it all. Nonetheless when we stop to think about it the people around us are quite the collection. If we are indeed the product of those that surround us then we are grateful for the excellence of those we call friends. (That would be you all, in case you were checking.)
So as you might guess when we get an invite from one of these exceptional people for an amazing adventure, we do our best to make good…
