I don’t know how many times I uttered that terse phrase yesterday. Saying goodbye, it’s… Hard. Rather than sputter on sentimentally I’m just going to post a ton of random pictures of some of the people we’ve come to love in our too short stay here. Thank you all for making our going away party such a touching success. We will miss the heck out of you!
I’m sitting in the City Library. Olive is watching Minecraft videos and Vick is reading a cookbook. This is the place where I spend the majority of my waking hours recently. It’s been my “office” for the last several months. This is the place where plantefunder.org took its new shape. The colors and sounds are so familiar that they have become my norm. Boat, Library, Gardens, Library, Boat. That’s my daily route. Even the handful of coffee shops I frequent aren’t as comfortable as this space has become. ...
We arrived in Australia almost exactly two and a half years ago. Pulling into Brisbane after 15 months of cruising seemed decidedly like the end of our adventure. We were trading sun soaked beaches, a persistent, intimate awareness of the weather, sundowners with dear friends, and nearly daily boat maintenance for the relative ease of city life, a stable job, and weather that wouldn’t really affect us. What I soon discovered was that it was just the start of a new adventure, one punctuated by forging new relationships, and building a life in a foreign country. Making this foreign country feel native—navigating the subtle cultural differences, finding our community, as well as coming to the understanding that all the animals that could kill us here, wouldn’t necessarily (under normal circumstances) want to kill us— was just as challenging and exciting as when we sailed through Mexico, or the Marquesas. ...
So this just popped up in our back yard. It’s been behind a fence for months now, slowly coming to form. I didn’t pay much attention but today I took the kids over there so Vick could have some space to put the boat back together after last weekend. This is what I discovered. And some genius solved a problem I had never even acknowledged was a problem. You know those noise makers that they sometimes have at playgrounds. The ones you want your kids to play because it seems indicative of an interest in music, until you realize it’s just their normal desire to make as much noise as possible. ...
I’ve found myself having rather candid conversations about our finances lately. Inevitably I find myself saying “we’re skidding sideways into each paycheck.” Indeed last month we made it across the line by searching pockets for laundry money. It would, if I were inclined to look at it that way, be a realization of one of my worst pre-cruising fears. Over the last week I conducted an informal survey of cruiser friends on Facebook. Of the 16 respondents 10 cited money as one of (if not the most significant) reasons that people fail to launch their cruising dreams. In About the Crew I described how we chose to throw financial responsibility to the wind, and I thought it suiting that I take a minute to let you know how that all shook out. ...
September has been a month of goodbyes and getting-to-know-yas. It’s been a month of changing weather (for the better) and changing government (for the worse). It’s been full of laughter, outdoor play and exciting summery events. We are all feeling like Brisbane is home, and except for the outrageous cost; and missing our family and friends back home; we are just delighted to be able to say that. In the spirit of photo-blogging when I don’t have enough new things to say, here’s another montage of our month. Hopefully the captions will tell our story well.
I’ve always known that there is a flow to life. Swim with it and you move quickly towards your destination. Swim against and you may get where you think you want to go, but man do you have to work for it. After a year an a half of cruising, I was well positioned to stay in the flow, but it was surprisingly difficult to maintain my conviction in the sleepy months surrounding the holidays. The city was all but dormant, there were no jobs posted, no real professional meetups, and I was starting to think of forcing, and leveraging. In other words, I was getting desperate. ...
You have seriously got to be kidding me. I love this city so much I want to dig up the homes of my family and friends and move them all here. Today we went to the Queensland State Library with the kids. We tricked them (yes, I am that devious) by telling them about the Augmented Reality treasure hunt that uses the ipad to find clues. In reality it is the best ruse ever to get kids to follow their parents on a magical tour of the coolest library I have ever been to. ...
I have been pretty relaxed about my blog posting since we arrived. I think I thought I had little to say but the photos I have taken tell another story, so I will let them…
Krister summed it up pretty perfectly over margaritas the other night, “This place is like a joke, it’s like they said let’s take all the money the US spends on the military and spend it on public services.” Nail, meet hammer. Brisbane has free museums, free multi-city-block-long-swimming-lagoon-with imported sand, free public transportation in and around the city center, free bikes to ride, reliable water fountains, tons of live music, and a government mandate that building owners provide public facing art installations. This place is like a joke, and I love the punchline. ...