Back Home….
Home again, to fine rain and grey skies, but we missed the recent snowfall in Kent, hopefully all we will get this winter. We’ve returned from the trip of a lifetime, and, as ever with wonderful holidays, it’s ended too soon. We’ve both enjoyed every minute but especially our family Christmas and New Year ‘Down Under’. Another lifetime moment to remember. The usual post-holiday mood dip is affecting us both but this time I had no commute to work on Monday morning, nor wondering what issues had arisen whilst I was away which felt really weird, the first day when retirement felt real. But we have sold the house whilst we were away and the small chain behind us are apparently ready to move quickly so we need to find somewhere else to live asap which’ll keep us from wishing we were still away.
They say travel broadens the mind, or one’s perspective, at least. Although we’ve been very fortunate over the years to travel widely and to have lived and worked abroad I still love the excitement of being away, the different ‘feel’ of a different country, the new experiences and change to the norm when I travel. Scenery, culture, food, environment, traffic, weather, airports, noise, smells, processes, procedures, passports, security but never, in my reasonable experience, the people who, I generally always find to be friendly, welcoming, helpful and keen to share a little of how proud they are of their country or culture – at least, if they are approached in the right way. No different this trip. Quite often, it’s not the supposedly big differences, like religion, I notice but more the very small things that surprise me, make me smile and sometimes make me wonder why we shouldn’t do the same. Who, for example, would object to a greater cafe culture like we found in Sydney and Melbourne, or the way traffic lights almost everywhere else move straight from ‘red’ to ‘green’ without our quaint long ‘amber’ in-between. (I can understand why we maybe wouldn’t quickly allow cows to roam our towns and roads as they do in Chennai or Bangalore, or the incessant flies we experienced along almost the whole length of the Great Ocean Road but you get my point.) As a visitor I like to understand a little about such differences and with the technology we carry in our pockets now it’s very easy to find out, or to find someone to ask if you don’t happen to have a resident daughter. Having spent most of my working life developing and implementing new IT and technology systems I also find it exciting when I come across an IT facility has been implemented, accepted and become normal in the public domain, probably a facility that helps make life a little bit easier. On this trip we encountered many such ‘different’ experiences and wondered whether similar changes might come about at home. Some things we can’t expect, such as the wonderful Aussie weather or Huntsman spiders in the bedroom, but the lifestyle, where work-life balance seemed to me to be more in balance than I’ve ever been used to, or the now almost cashless Sydney & Melbourne society, or the cafe/coffee/brunch/friends/’no worries’ culture, is something I much prefer.
Aussie distances are often vast. Being in the country reminds you it is a very big country indeed. Even neighbouring New Zealand, just the size of the UK but with only 4 million people living there compared to our 63 million, means there are endless miles of beautiful but often forbidding nature before the next township or roadhouse. We took the train from Adelaide to Sydney, a seemingly short distance on the map, but the train travelled all through the night and when we awoke the next day we were still travelling across the ‘same’ bush, not somewhere to ever find yourself unprepared, in my opinion, and in our case a lovely breakfast was served shortly afterwards! But the beauty of such places continues to astonish me, even more-so this trip, and there has often been too much country in view to fit into my camera viewfinder, now a constant travel companion again. Since I last carried a camera everywhere technology has again moved forward and I’ve really enjoyed learning and using the new camera, Mac, Lightroom and web technology to document it (not to mention our ‘postcards!) and adding many more images to the ‘family history’ Dropbox repository. So I’ve made a number of small albums of some of the storybook images of the trip and put them on Google Photos, a web tool I like because it presents well on a phone, tablet or even large TV screen, it has intuitive scroll and slideshow facilities for the viewer and it allows me to show some of my new ‘panorama’ and moving image shots in the same online album. (Never again will we photographers have a terrified captive audience for a holiday snaps slideshow with projector and screen in a hot, darkened living room!) I hope you like them and that they convey a little of the fun and wonder we’ve both enjoyed these last couple of months.
