I only have a few more days in Australia – can’t believe I left home almost a month ago. I’ll be sorry to leave as I feel I’ve got into a rhythm here. Quite a lazy, self-indulgent one really!

I have two more trips left on my Zone 2 Metcard so will use that up on Monday on a trip to Mornington, I think. It’s a pretty town on the coast – Port Phillip Bay side – with lovely quirky shops and lots of cafes. We spent some time there a few days ago, in a bookshop/cafe where it was difficult not to buy books. If I were going straight back to Barry I might have been tempted… but I am really conscious of the weight of my case and the fact that I won’t be taking real books (as opposed to e-books) on the journey ahead to New York. So to wait till July to read books I bought in March.. well, maybe not!

I also took a long bus ride to Portsea, almost at the tip of the Mornington Peninsula. It was a beautiful day, sunny, warm and pleasant. After a drink at the Portsea Hotel, on a lawn overlooking the sea and with views across the narrow gap of sea to the Bellarine Peninsula, I met a crowd of people out on a day trip and had fish and chips with them at a beach cafe. Later I walked along the little pier, watched the Queenscliff – Sorrento car ferry and took care not to disturb the silent anglers. It’s amazing to think of the ships that braved the wild Southern Ocean a couple of hundred years ago, before finally making it through the treacherous gap between the peninsulas and into the safety of Port Phillip Bay. A few years ago when Ben and Victoria and I did a road trip around Australia, we drove from Alice Springs via Adelaide and along the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne. It was winter, wet, wild and stormy and I was fascinated but not surprised by the stories of shipwrecks along the coast. How any ships actually made it to Melbourne is a mystery.

It was my birthday a few days ago – you know, the ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me?’ one! Apart from experiencing my first diabetic hypo (debilitating, especially as I didn’t recognise it for what it was) I had a lovely day. We drove north to Warrandyte, a beautiful place in the hills between Melbourne and the Dandenongs. Nestled in a wooded valley next to the Yarra river we found a great restaurant, had some lovely food and then wandered around craft places and a gem of an antique shop. It’d be a lovely, inspiring place to live and set up a glass business….Then we shot into Melbourne to the Theosophical Bookshop for another fix – and a birthday present from Jo, a book befitting my age!

Back home, Ben started on his present to me – a website for Objay de Quirk. I’ve decided not to sell my work online, as each piece is unique and individual and cannot be replicated. Instead, Ben suggested a portfolio of all the pieces, whether glass, fibres, textiles, metal… with a gallery to display them. Unfortunately I can’t get the website up and running till July when I get back to Barry, as all the photos of my work are on my home PC. I also plan to run workshops as well as give info on how and where to buy items or place commissions.

At the Porthceri fayre in February, someone asked where I found the seaglass for my jewellery. When I replied it was all from Barry beaches, she said she’d be interested in work made from Gower seaglass as she had a childhood connection to the area. So when I get back, I’m planning a trip to the Gower and other places in South and West Wales. In the meantime, and with the help of Lucy and Jo, I’ve been beachcombing in the Kananook/Seaford area of Port Phillip Bay and have a collection of glass, shells and strange metallic-like stones which will form the basis for a new range of jewellery. And I’ve read that there’s beautiful glass to be found on the beaches of Alaska, so while my fellow travellers are kayaking and swinging on ropes over glaciers, I’ll be down by the ocean, scrutinising at the water’s edge.

This morning we felted the bag I’ve been knitting for Lucy – see the before and after pictures! Great fun but hot on the hands, even with 2 pairs of rubber gloves on! Jo finished it off, Ben took the photos and it’s now sitting drying on a rack. I’m used to felting with Merino wool fibres, which is a lot easier, but I have to admit to being drawn to this method too, as you can knit away anywhere and just do the final stage at the kitchen sink. With knitted items, though, you have to make sure that you are using 100% untreated wool. Another thing I intend to experiment more with when I finally get home.

Finally today, we visited the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park at
Langwarrin. Apart from me being fresh blood for mozzies, it was wonderful. A huge park, with a lake, and containing some of the most inspiring sculptures! Worth another visit as we didn’t have time to see the gallery inside, or sample coffee and cake at the cafe. Jo and I may catch up with that next week before I leave….

Well, this blog was never going to be written every day! And once I’m on the trip to New York, who know how often I’ll be able to access the internet and send it on its way.

Australia is beautiful, and hot, and pretty wet on occasion too. A week ago I went to the beach, forgot water and a hat, set off at about 1pm and got home about 3.30. Can’t you just tell a Brit abroad?!! There I was in the mind-blowing heat of early afternoon, hurrying from shady tree to shady tree on the road home, gasping for water and putting ‘mind over matter’ into practice. When I finally staggered through the door, Jo and Lucy were home and getting ready to go out…to the beach. Did I want to go? Well, might give it a miss…

Next day, we did it properly: all four of us, in the cool of the morning off to the beach again. Beautiful! A cool breeze, delicious water and lot of shells and sea glass to be gathered.

Since then we’ve been up to Daylesford (quite near Castlemaine) in the goldfields area – just for the day – to see a Gay Pride march, drink more coffee, explore more cake. It’s a beautiful part of the country, quite different from the Mornington Peninsula with its beaches and vineyards. But the one thing the two areas seem to have in common is their artists’ communities. Daylesford is full of great little shops selling local crafts of all sorts, plus a few galleries and lots of cafes. A nice place to live. The house Ben and Jo were planning to buy is not too far from here, and had a good plot of land attached. But things change, and they knew they would miss being by the sea, so the move is off. Friends are actually throwing them a party next weekend to celebrate not moving!

Ben and I took a bus one day out to Mt Martha, a pretty little place with expensive real estate… more great cafes…and a lot of beach and sailing boats. The great thing about buses is their height off the ground, enabling you to inspect people’s gardens and swimming pools usually hidden behind fencing. I have always been amazed at the tiny gardens most people have here – you’d think they’d have massive ones in Australia. But land is so expensive, especially in the city, or in the sought-after areas on the coast, that most people prefer to build the biggest house they can on their plot, and make do with very little outside space. You can see that lots of older properties have larger gardens, but also that many of them have obviously sold off part of their land as there are occasionally modern bungalows slotted in between the older houses.

The names of villages here on the coast are interesting: Mt Martha, Mt Eliza, Rosebud….! So I googled the last one, expecting it to be an original settler’s wife or daughter, and found the story of a ship, ‘The Rosebud’, that foundered and sank just offshore about 150 years ago. The settlers were pretty poor and lacking in pretty much everything, so salvaged what they could: wooden beams for their houses and for furniture, linen and other materials for clothing, and so on. Word got around the area and people came from farther inland to see what they could get their hands on and it became the thing to ‘go to Rosebud’. And so the name stuck.

The farthest south I’ve been so far has to be The Peninsula Hot Springs – a fantastic evening out! We drove about an hour south (much farther and we’d have dropped off the end of Australia) and into this hidden-away beautiful spot. After a lovely meal, we changed into our cossies and took to the pools. The first one was pleasantly warm and I could have stayed there forever, but with lots of others to try out, we moved on. Ben and Jo were regulars at one time but hadn’t been for a while. The next pool was too hot – rather like the Bear’s Porridge – I only managed to go in to just over my knees. But the third pool, farther up the hillside, was magic! Just the right temperature, eucalyptus branches overhanging and exuding their scent, the sky darkening, stars twinkling through the trees…You get the picture?! After that we tried out several more, and the sauna, and finally got out of the water after 3 hours. When we got home I Skyped Victoria but had to hand over to Ben as I was so drowsy I could barely speak! If this is what hot springs are like, then roll on Alaska!

So what else has been happening? An hour-long train trip to Melbourne the day before yesterday – I love my Kindle! Hours spent in the National Gallery and Melbourne Library where they have a fantastic exhibition of children’s book illustrators; wandering along Bourke Street and drinking in the Art Deco buildings – above the levels of the shops, that is. And Melbourne has fantastic arcades – just like Cardiff!

I have another two or three trips planned before I leave. Use up my Metcards! Watch this space….

I have just said goodbye to my house for 4 months – such a strange feeling! So how did this come about?

Well, I suppose it all started quite simply with me booking a ticket to Australia to stay with Ben and Jo, after weeks of putting it off as I had a sneaky suspicion that I might not get the dates right. I should have listened to that little voice in my head. I was certain I wanted to go in March, as last year I found it too hot and tiring in February. So I finally made the decision and booked – one of those ‘V’ tickets that you can’t change, as I found out later.

At the end of November I had an appointment at the hospital where my titanium knee was checked out and found to be excellent, even if it won’t bend more than 90 degrees. The other knee was not so good, bone on bone apparently, so I had another steroid injection which would stave off surgery for another year. All fine so far…

The knowledge that I had a year of painfree travel ahead naturally prompted me to get on the internet and start googling all the places I wanted to travel to after Australia… and at this point I came across overland trips. Of course, the first destination I looked at was Australia (again! twice in one year?!) because most overland travel companies went through central Asia and China before heading south – who could resist that!  After that, there was no way I’d even contemplate flying anywhere – it had to be overland. I had almost decided on a journey taking 5 months and ending up in Sydney just before Christmas 2011. So you can imagine how devastated I was when I discovered that this trip – and most of the other London to Oz trips – involved pretty high altitudes, which I knew I could not cope with.

Then, bumbling about on the Ozbus website, I came across the most amazing journey of all, and knew I had to do it! London to New York, over land and sea – three months of excitement and adventure across northern Europe, Russia and Siberia, Mongolia, China, Alaska, Canada and the northern states of the USA. I made contact with Rob from Ozbus and shot almost daily emails off to him with a thousand queries which he patiently answered. The fact that he had been on the first-ever London to New York trip in 2010  (LNY1) meant that he had great insider knowledge of essentials and fascinating trivia – and his photos were great!

But, my plans were to be dashed again – how many disappointments can a person have? The Ozbus date of departure from London was March 27th. I was due to fly back to London from Australia on March 30th. I had two options: change my ticket or delay the overland trip for a year… Neither was a good bet. The ticket was a ‘V’ ticket, as I found out, and could not be changed. And in a year’s time I could be lame and crippled and waiting for surgery. Rob came up with the solution: join the rest of the travellers somewhere in Europe. And so I cast caution to the wind, didn’t stop to ask how the house would look after itself for 4 months (but I have a very good friend who has stepped in, selflessly!) and went ahead and booked.

The next couple of months were a whirlwind of activity and sleepless nights, as I worked out how to get visas for Russia, Mongolia and China – and still get my passport back from a visa company in London in time to travel to Australia on March 1st. And then there were the jabs: Hep A, Hep B, tick-borne encephalitis, typhoid, polio, tetanus, diphtheria…and rabies, not to mention the GP prescriptions to cover my meds for the months away. Finally, packing two bags: one for Australia and the other for the LNY2 trip. A headache which will probably come back to haunt me, as I don’t think I’ve got it right! I am now in Australia with too few clothes, and may have put too many in the Ozbus bag. The friend who has sacrificed herself to care for my house is also travelling up to Heathrow on March 31st to spirit away my Australia bag and substitute the Ozbus one in its place. How’s that for organisation! And a day later I fly to Warsaw and have a day to myself before the Ozbus adventurers catch up with me.

So now I’m in Australia, glowing in the humidity. LNY2 is a few weeks away and if the bag isn’t packed right, then it’s too bad. In the meantime, I’ve been to the information centre in Frankston, on the Mornington Peninsula, and have handfuls of brochures and bus timetables. Tomorrow I’m off to explore, now that the jet lag has worn off and at the weekend we’re off to Castlemaine in the Goldfields, northwest of Melbourne. More of all that later….