Today's word is leading to another hugely long rave from me. Be warned and feel free to skip over this. I just feel like writing here at length of past travels, mainly to remind myself of what I did back in those earlier decades. It's a contrast to my past ten years, when I've had to really push myself step by step over years to even leave this flat very much!
In these recent times I've only travelled once every year or two between this city where I now live, and the big one down south that I spent most of my life in. These trips were made with reluctance and even dread, as I fear flying, as well as the crowds and crazy fast pace of that city. These things have only got worse since I left 16 years ago, but my mother is still there, otherwise I might never go back, or travel much at all to be honest.
But when I was much younger I longed to travel, and did a lot of it!
At 21 I took off on an impulse with my first long-term boyfriend. All we had in the way of planning was a map and an urge to go. We backpacked up the east coast from Melbourne, by bus and occasional hitchiking, stopping for a few days to a week, in youth hostels along the way: Sydney, Newcastle, Coffs Harbour, Byron Bay, Nimbin, Brisbane, Rockhampton, Great Keppel Island, these were some of the places we visited on our way north. Our travels took as far up the coast as Townsville, where we stopped and lived for a month. We were temporary housemates with two warm and fun women and a child, in a hundred-year-old Queenslander, still standing after many a cyclone.
After that we bussed it inland and stopped a day in Mount Isa. That was special to me because my dad and his brothers had in their youth ridden rodeos there and won prizes. The Mount Isa rodeo was a big and famous event on the circuit, one that had been going since at least the 1930s. I wonder if it is still an happening now. Wouldn't surprise me at all if it was. Aside from that, the place had a future meaning. My closest friend here now of 16 years was born in Finland, but lived most of her childhood and early adult years in Mount Isa. She still has a brother who lives there. They were part of a Finnish community that still exists there, who first arrived as part of a wave of migrant workers to the mines in the decades after the second world war.
After Mount Isa we continued on inland to the Northern Territory on another long bus trip, as the landscape became more and more surreal, almost apocalyptic. A typical sight on this journey was the roadkill of large animals. Nonetheless I was enthralled by the remoteness and human solitude of this place. I remember a particular moment from this journey, when the bus stopped late at night halfway to Tennant Creek. The stop was at the only rest-stop/servo/food-place, or anything, on the only road through there. There were hundreds of kilometres of empty desert in either direction. Walking across the empty road away from the bus and bright-lit servo-oasis, I found myself heading alone into the awesome red desert. There was just enough moonlight and bright starlight to see dimly to the horizon. The night was hot and like swimming in thick air. As I stood on my own a little way into the desert, I could sense that primal old place throbbing with some powerful vibration. Perhaps, unimpeded by the trappings of modern civilisation, I was feeling and hearing the deep, powerful voice of the ancient earth. Whatever the experience, it stayed with me strongly and remains to this day in my memory.
Alice Springs after that for some days, and a stop in Coober Pedy on the bus heading to Adelaide. We visited one of the dugout underground homes there, surprisingly livable in such a fiercely hot place. In this part of our journey the main highway was still red desert dirt. Only in later years was it surfaced with bitumen. After our stop there, we got on the bus to continue, but the driver couldn't get it to start! With the prospect of a night of uncertain accommodation, we did the only thing that seemed to be done. All the passengers hopped out and, with the combined strength of numbers, successfully push-started the bus!
Adelaide was our last stop before returning to Melbourne. We had been travelling for about four months by now, and wanted to travel on longer. But my boyfriend's mother had a heart attack in Victoria, which meant we needed to return, cutting our journeying short. Regardless of this, it was a never-to-be-repeated trip of a lifetime, which we somehow managed to do even though we barely had ten cents between us back then.
In my thirties I went overseas several times, only able to do that with the help of grants I applied for from government arts bodies. It was part of them funding some projects I worked on while over there. Over the course of these various short trips I visited: Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Segovia, Toledo, Vienna, Rome (my favourite world city), Toreno, Florence and Venice.
Later I visited America and Canada in a few more short trips, again funded by work I was able to raise funds for: Los Angeles, San Franciso, St Louis, New York and Montreal. On my final US trip I spent two months in the middle of a blizzardy winter on Cape Cod, working illegally on the front desk of an old motel to cover the cost of my accommodation there.
I also did a road trip around New Zealand over a couple of weeks during those thirty-something years. Perhaps the most memorable experience there was touching the face of a glacier. But there were many other wondrous experiences in the magnificent landscape of that country.
These days I am mostly content to travel in the chair at my computer, meeting up with online friends here on the forum in different parts of Australia, and with others overseas I've known sometimes for several years, through Facebook and other sites. Via Google I enjoy random learning about and imagining other cultures and landscapes. I still take the yearly or two-yearly air trips to visit my mother. I also catch up then with old friends, and a few cousins and aunts while I'm the. In alternative years, mum visits me here, as she will be doing in the middle of next year. Because where I live is a major tourist destination, I sometimes say I don't need to travel anymore, as it's like I live a holiday here. 
