The Other L Word

The train ride was painless, not at all what I had anticipated. I don’t do well in confined spaces for very long, if I know I cannot escape from them. I had not even considered the lack of air conditioning, but of course the weather did not disappoint. It was in the 80s. Some train person had the foresight to open every window on the train. The cross breeze made it acceptable. We were in a cabin for six, but only one thirtyish-year-old man asked to join us. No one bothered to look at our tickets for the first two hours; by that time we were in Veszprém. An hour later, the man left us and we had six seats to ourselves.

We had cleaned out the fridge, taking food that would spoil with us for our meals. Loaded down with four sandwiches, extra cheese cut into thick chunks, two beers (they do spoil when unattended), a large bottle of water, three tangerines, and assorted other goodies, we looked like a catering service. What the conductor happened to walk by again, he looked in, said something like “Oh, you are Hungarian. Good appetite”, in Hungarian of course. 

During the trip, I finished the novel that I started when the train pulled out of Deli station: The Dressmaker, by Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck. I only brought one other book with me; I am thinking I should save that for the trip home otherwise I will chew on my foot out of boredom. There were plenty of catnaps in between reading, so it wasn’t all recreation. Sleeping on a train takes stamina holding your head in place. It’s not easy.

We arrived fifteen minutes late, in the other L word, again better than expectations. There were innumerable stops for ten to twenty minutes, but no passport control to hold us up.  We had no idea where to go to find our hostel once we arrived. We only had 2 ½ months to prepare for this, but that is a map thing. Everyone knows I don’t do maps, but Ron is Mr. Map. He fell by the wayside on this one. We walked 2 blocks in the wrong direction, before we asked for directions.

Once we were turned around, our hostel was a breeze to find. I have to say even in the dark, this city has more graffiti than Budapest ever thought possible and that is a real stretch. The hostel is a converted prison. Our room is an old cell, needless to say, there is only one window that opens on high, with bars on it, preventing any cross ventilation and is HOT. The temperature when we arrived was still in the mid-80s. More about the hostel later. It is time for a b and b = beer and bed.

For those not in the know, The L Word was a television show on cable TV.

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What Now My Love?

What Now My Love? Now that it's over...Snowy, cold Budapest, that is what is next.

So today is our last day of vacation. Tomorrow morning, we fly from here to Christ Church, Christ Church to Tokyo. There we have a twenty-one hour stop-over, where the plan is to leave staying overnight in a hotel and returning the airport to continue the journey. We will then fly from Tokyo to Munich followed by Munich to Budapest. We arrive in Budapest at 10:30pm. I have to be at school the following morning at 9am for State exams. In some ways, I am happy to be going home. I need to be assured where the bathroom is during the middle of the night. When you move around as often as we have, in nighttime sleepy coma, it seems like someone is pulling bad trick by moving the bathroom around the building.
 

We won’t have much to report today. We are getting laundry done, hoping clean laundry packs easier that dirty to fit it all into our allocated two suitcases. That third suitcase is still sitting in our room. It is like an unwanted animal that is left along the roadside that keeps finding its way back home. Well, if I am honest, I have yet been able to set it free into the wild with hopes that someone will adopt it, giving it a good home.
 

Unfortunately, this hostel does not use the Internet service that I have credit with. All of the YHAs use Global Gossip, but this is not a YHA hostel. To find locations where I may be able to use it, I went into an electronics store to ask. Better yet, they have just received the iPad, so they were available to try out. I had an opportunity to try the iPad, do a web search and found that the hostel two doors down from our hostel uses Global Gossip. I am going to try to see if they will let me use their lobby for an hour.

Chances are nothing special is going to happen today, but if it does, it will appear here later as a separate posting. This trip, we have traveled on jets, planes, cars, shuttles, vans, trucks, ferries, and trains. We missed bicycles, horses, skateboards, and helicopters. Always leave wanting.
 

Now, before I sign off from Auckland, I would like everyone to get up and give Ron a standing ovation for his perfect planning on this trip. Every time someone asked me anything about it, I had to defer to him. He did it all, researched it all over months, made all of the reservations, in essence he did the entire thing without much input from me. I make the last comment only on a positive note. Usually, I am overwhelmed with school; Ron will run things by me, but I generally nod my head, say “whatever you think” since he had researched the ins and outs, so in reality the entire trip is a surprise. He did a superlative job, though I admit I did have my doubts when I learned how many bus rides we would be taking, how many cities we would be at, how many one night stands were involved, but it all turned out excellently. Kudos, Ron and thank you for another fantastic vacation adventure.    

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Looking for the elusive Greebe.

We were eating our dinner in the hostel dining room when Ron’s kitchen companion came over to chat about the day. He and she met over a stovetop in the hostel kitchen as they both started to put their pot on the same burner; she developed it into a bonding experience. With four choices of burners per stovetop, what were the odds these two would come together? 

Her husband and I were just bystanders watching and waiting to see where this was all going to lead. Maybe they would take it to the next level and share their  refrigerator shelf space, but thankfully, we only had one more night. 

With the enthusiasm of a young girl who had just experience her first glimpse of a penis, she asked if we had found the Greebe. Thinking we had misunderstood her New Zealand accented words, we asked her to repeat herself. After three attempts of her repeating and our looking blankly, she finally spilled (NZ accent) it out for us G-R-E-E-B-E. We told her she did not need to spell in capital letters; we could understand lower case spelling just as well. What we still did not know was what a Greebe was. 

With the same animation as when she first approached us, she explained that a Greebe was a rare NZ bird that can only land on water, not land. It only flies during the day or when the moon is out so that they can do a water landing. There are only limited numbers left, but two have been spotted near the wharf sitting on a nest. Then there was something about their not being sighted for two weeks and more about the water landings, but we should go look at them. Convoluted information, I agree, but it was our last night here, there was nothing else to do, and a walk would help dinner digest and maybe help this story sit better too. 

From a warm to hot day, the weather pulled a fast one. It was cool to cold and the wind had picked up considerably. From the hostel, we had to walk away from town to find the marina. Once there, we were supposed to find the willow tree where the nest has been spotted and the Greebe if home and receiving guests will be located. Directions did not include the fact that the marina was a good twenty minute walk before making visual contact. Physical contact took another fifteen minutes to get them looking like real boats as opposed to toy boats from the distance. 

Over the river and through the woods to the Greebe’s nest we go. Ron knows the way to plan out the day.  (If you didn’t get that last part, it is a take-off on a Christmas song. “Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go. The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh…). 

We found the willow tree and six of its willow tree friend or family. All of them are so close to the water they will never need to worry about drought conditions. A couple of these have a real drinking problem; they are rooted in the water. Cautiously moving about as we were looking under the skirts of willow branches brushing them aside seeking signs of Greebes, all we found was disappointment.  Checking the air, we did not see any birds looking to do a water landing. Who ever heard of a bird who cannot land on land? This whole thing is starting to sound flaky. Either this woman was running us on a wild Greebe chase or she had not taken her medications in proper doses today. When I was in high school in Michigan, we used to get others to go trap snipes at night in the woods. There was no such thing, but it was great fun watching them try. Greebes may be NZ snipes. 

By the time we returned, wind burned and chilled, our naturalist was nowhere to be found. Were we hearing loud chuckles emanating through the halls or was it our paranoid imagination? We just may file a Greebeance if we can find anyone to listen to our complaint.

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Time to Leave Auckland

Time to leave Auckland for this go around, but we will be back. Perhaps by then, we will either need the rest or find something exciting to do. D has proven to be a gracious host. He does do a very nice breakfast with his home baked muffins. We left right after breakfast to catch a bus downtown. The plan is to go to Esquires Coffee where you receive one free hour of Internet with every purchase. We will make our purchases individually for more time. At 12:15, we will catch the NakedBus out of the city.
Esquires turned out to be a bit of a dud. At the very least they are very misleading in their offer, which claims an hour of free WiFi Internet. There is a catch, a rather significant one. Yes, you do get an hour; however, you only receive 25 MB of data transfer. Twenty-five MB in this day and age is a thimble full of data. I sometimes get 1 e-mail that is over that amount. Needless to say, I was downloading my mail and was kicked off of the Internet within minutes. Ron went to place his order, I received his sign in card and again within minutes, slam-bam-thank you sir-goodbye. That was the end of part 2 of the Internet chronicles, but the beginning of my dashed hopes of having free Internet service. Purchasing it is NZ $3 for a half hour some places and an hour at others, but that still runs into money when I receive over a hundred e-mails a day and have a need to blog. Okay, put that on hold for now.

Time to board the NakedBus. There are no assigned seats, so you need to muscle your way in early on. NakedBus is like an earthbound version of RyanAir or other economy modes of transportation. We are taking multiple trips with this line, but this is the first of them. We will ride for four hours from Auckland to Rotorua (pronounced roe-toe-rue-ah OR if you prefer row-tow-roux-ah). More on this town later, but the bus was great. The seats are wide, new, and comfortable. They have video screens hanging from the ceiling, but no movies were shown. Just as well. I found the scenery interesting most of the time, green hills and dales, pastures of sheep and cows, but napping was on the agenda as well. There are no bathrooms on the bus, so the rest stop had everyone making a mad dash out the door.

As we pulled into Rotorua, it definitely had a feel good vibration. The business district was extensive, but still had a cozy, small town feel to them. We are staying at a YHA Youth Hostel Association. We used a couple of YHA facilities in Australia and found them to be excellent, so we are testing the NZ varieties. Regardless of the moniker, any age persons are welcomed and we are not the oldest here. Our modest private room is ensuite with two twin beds, a plastic chair, a wooden box for a table and some hooks on the walls. The beds are comfortable, the sheets and shower are clean; all our needs are cared for. The kitchen has six stove tops, each with four burners, six sinks as well and two huge refrigerators for everyone to store their food. Footlocker type shelving is available for non-perishables. Stickers are provided to mark all of your goodies so others will not mistake them for their own.

We trekked to the nearest grocery store, which turned out to be a real trek. It is outside of the downtown area in a mall type one level of stores environment. If I had my camera, I would have taken pictures of the different and unusual foods lining the shelves. This is a fascinating part of travel, one you are sure to experience when hostelling. It saves so much money by cooking then eating out 3 meals a day, every day. Alternatively, with the grocery store such as walk, when you forget a stable, you want to kick yourself. As soon as we returned, we did not get butter. But heck, we did remember the beer, so all was not lost.

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Take the "Awe" Out of Auckland

We slept until 6:30, but was up and showered again by 7:00. Though we had told D we wanted breakfast at 8:30, when he heard us up, he served us right away. It was an impressive spread of jellies and marmalades with homemade muffins and toasts. He had Wheatbix and granola, orange juice, fresh coffee, and then made us scrambled eggs.


The bus stop is right outside their property line. Paying NZ$3.60 for one bus ride shocked my system a bit, but it took us right downtown. D had warned us at breakfast that the city had done close to nothing about decorating for Christmas. The reasoning was multicultural sensitivity, which he pooh-poohed claiming the city goes all out for the Indian holiday as well as the Chinese New Year. He was right. There were barely any decorations at all and those that did exist were pitiful. Not even the department stores had decent decorations in the their windows. One store had puppets playing out Cinderella. What does that have to do with Christmas? If I were a little boy, I would feel totally cheated.


After three hours, I shared with Ron that I did not think there was any “awe” in Auckland. For this I was admonished with the questions of how could I come to that conclusion after only three hours o walking around downtown, the pier, the sky tower, having taken two buses, and had one coffee? How silly of me to make snap judgments. An hour or so later, he confided that most of his research for this trip did say that Auckland is the most boring as compared to the rest of the country. I felt reprieved.


We did not do all that much. After a trip to the Sky Tower where one of the tourist offices is located, we took a free circuit bus around the center of the city to look at the buildings. The mix of old and new architecture in many cities that redeveloped or upgraded themselves can be a stimulating visual mix, here not so. A walk around the wharf was equally unexciting. Compared to Sydney or Cape Town, this has nothing at all. We took another LINK bus around its circuit through different neighoborhoods, but stayed on for a complete go-round. There were a couple of districts that looked promising with interesting looking shops, but otherwise, nothing special yet again.


We have a few days here before we fly out of here home again, so checked out some hostels. We booked the one that offered a NZ$12 discount per night, because I have an International Press Card. By 5:00 pm, we were ready to head back to the B and B, if nothing else to check on our luggage. The problem was, we could not remember the bus numbers to get back. Asking several bus drivers only resulted in conflicting information. We were sent back and forth over an eight block distance until finally an older woman driver insisted she take us to where we needed to catch our correct bus.


B had been trying to call the airline luggage department on our behalf for most of the day. He said most attempts resulted in busy signals or being put on hold for so long he would just hang up. We tried three times. Three is indeed the charm. We reached a person, Amy. She said that a huge number of bags had just arrived. If we gave her a half hour, she would look for ours and call back on my mobile. I was thankful I had bougth a local SIM card. To stay preoccupied, I went out to write. When a half hour passed, I lost hope. By now it was 7:10 pm and the luggage office closes at 8 pm. Just then Amy called. She found both of our bags, would give them to a courier at 9 pm, and he should be to us by 10 pm.


We went to a Syrian fast food place for dinner. It was close by so if the courier had problems, he had my mobile and I could run back quickly. With plenty of time to spare, we were back waiting. I was outside at 9:30 pm pacing. Ten o'clock on the dot, the courier pulled into the driveway. I had to seriously insist he take a tip. Finally, he did after I told him this was like a Santa delivering our presents. Come to think of it, Santa doesn't take tips. Maybe I should have offered him milk and cookies instead.

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Prison Break

No, this is not a rehash of the American TV show, Prison Break. This is prison break, Hungarian style. Who said my life is not interesting? Um, that would have been me. What was I thinking? Last night I checked my e-mail after a small dinner party we hosted. There was a cryptic message "I am John Doe's sister. I need for you to contact me immediately regarding him." Certainly, his name is not John Doe. Duh! I am saving him from public disgrace, but this story is too interesting not to share. I e-mailed her back stating we had not heard from her brother for months and I was a bit concerned. He is an American living here in Budapest, but only has been for the last five months. John Doe was a B and B guest a couple of years ago. He landed in Budapest with some friends who were going to hang out here for a year. After a few weeks of being a roomie, he could not take their fighting, so walked out and landed in our apartment. He paid for a week, but then was getting tight on money, so asked if he could barter his services for things about the apartment. We reluctantly agreed to barter another ten days. John fulfilled his part of the bargain, convinced to barter for more work and another ten days. He completed all of his obligations, but left before his freebie nights were used. We gave him an I.O.U. or in this case a WE.O.U. for twelve more nights to be used whenever we had a vacancy. He disappeared for over a year, without any contact and no responses to my e-mails. In September 2007, he reappeared out of thin air back to Budapest. Popped in to see us, but only Ron was home. They had coffee. A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed to come over and see us. When he did, he needed a place to stay. He was living with a woman friend, but it was not working out. He came here for three nights, but during that time, met a hostel owner who was closing the place for the winter and agreed to let John stay there in exchange for keeping an eye on the place and doing some work. John left us to go there. Thanksgiving came and we invited John to dinner. He brought a date. A young man we wanted to card to see if he was of legal age. John is in his mid-forties. This was the last we saw of him, but he did send me a couple of e-mails regarding his adventures with getting a long term Visa to stay in Hungary. That was at the end of November. Nothing after that. According to his sister, in December, he took a bag of drugs he found at the hostel to the US Embassy claiming it belonged to the workers there. He was arrested and put in jail. When he was released, he went back to the hostel and broke windows. He was arrested again and put in jail. Upon release, he went to the Marriott hotel; we were already on vacation by this point, so he would not have been able to reach us. He became disruptive and abusive at the hotel and they called the police. Once again, he was thrown in jail where he has been since December 18th. While in jail, he became combative with the guards, so they put him into solitary confinement for two weeks. His family in the mid-western part of the US hired two attorneys here. The Embassy official finally convinced John to sign a release of confidentiality statement, so they could keep his family updated. In this release, he also named ME, stating we are the only family he has here in Budapest and he trusts us. Notice the plural pronouns, but only my name had been given. Ron lucked out on this one. My guess had been that he was bordering on bi-polar, but now it seems he has had a psychotic break. He had called his mother to say he was named Ambassador to Hungary by President Obama and was having a private jet sent to pick her up. He told the same story to the embassy people and the guards at the prison. Life is interesting.

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Adelaide, Oh Sweet Adelaide

Not even twenty-four hours in Adelaide and I am ready for medication again. Part of it most likely due to not having the air conditioning on last night. We did not ask for it, because it would cool the three other rooms around us too, so we were being considerate. Having the window open for air did not work either. We are on the ground floor and the party people who are not allowed to cause a ruckus inside, stand outside to drink and carry on. It was a trade-off between heat or noise. I woke with a sinus headache, not feeling rested, and as dreary looking as before Hobart. Where did that Hobart healing go so quickly? Up in the kitchen, we made our scrambled eggs and raisin bread toast. There were young and old scrambling around cooking, cleaning up their dishes, or using the computers in the lounge. As I watch all of these twenty somethings, it makes me sad that I missed out on these opportunities in my youth. When I grew up, hostels certainly existed, people my age backpacked primarily through Europe, and experienced life. I on the other had was raised with fear. Fear of being alone, fear of asking my family if I could go, fear that I knew the answers already, fear of not knowing what, where, when, and especially how to navigate from one place to another. There certainly wasn't Internet back then to help plan the details out or to keep in touch to let those left behind know I was still living and breathing. For God's sake, my family had a fit when I went to Europe the first time and I was then thirty years old. They had no sophistication about travel, museums, culture, or life experiences in that fashion. Since then, I have truly made up for these deficits by traveling extensively. This is the forty-eight country Ron and I have have visited together in the last fifteen years. I have been to Mexico before I met him, so I am one up on him. With all of the flurry of youthful activity, I also regret that my own nephews have been raised with the same types of restrictions I lived through. Our parents were so much more liberal with my brother, it would seem he would be more liberal with his sons, but apparently not. When we lived in California, I repeatedly asked for them to come visit, even offering to pay the airfare. Since, we have made the same offer for their visiting Budapest, all to deaf ears. Even appealing directly to the offspring has not dented their armor. The response is always, I will have to ask my father, but then there is never another response. The eldest no longer needs his father's permission. Soon he will be graduating college and is over twenty-one years old. One would think that if you had college buddies who knew you had an uncle in Europe, they would prompt you to visit just so they could join along. Free lodging for all, what a deal. Apparently, American youth have a lot to learn from European and Asian youth who seem too jump on any opportunities they can. Back to the moment, Ron tried booking the tour he was interested in, the wine tour. Unfortunately, they were not planning on running it tomorrow due to lack of interest. He is considering other tours with different companies. The major agenda item today was shopping. We have not bought a single souvenir or gift yet. Each time I have seen something, the response I get is “That will be everywhere we go, do you really want to lug it around? Wait until we return to Adelaide.” Refusing to do anything until we went shopping seemed to work, now we had to remember where the shops were. The first one we went to had some of the things that caught my eye in Melbourne, but at twice the cost and not as good quality. Keep looking. Another shop, but more disappointment. They did not have what I wanted. They did have some adorable plastic bag storage bags with kangaroos and koalas on it. I bought five of them for gifts. With today being Saturday, nothing will be open tomorrow, so the pressure was on. There was a small department store that is a chain and I had a feeling, which turned out to be correct. They had some stuffed animals that were just right and at a better price than anywhere I had looked. Put a bunch of these in the shopping cart. As we were sitting at a coffee stop, Ron had mentioned Iowa with the idea of going there this summer. Normally, that would be fine with me, but we may have to return to New Jersey to clean out my father's house, in addition to deciding on what to do with our things in his back room. This led to my re-entry thinking, which I really hate dealing with. Re-entry thinking usually starts toward the last two to three days of a vacation if I am lucky enough to hold it off that long. The phenomenon creeps on on me with thoughts of things I need to do as soon as I get home that have to be dealt with. As soon as I get home, I have fourteen thesis students to advice and kick in their butts to get their thesis written and completed by March. Never have I had this many in one semester before, so the reading is going to be insurmountable, but each was warned with a strict time line expected of them for my return. This led to thoughts of my father and his predicaments, leading to the B and B if we were both gone at the same time, but how could one of us make decisions on what was worth keeping or not alone? However, this led to the negative thoughts that neither of us have a valid driver's license any longer, so there is the hassle of getting from the airport, but more importantly, the stress of being held captive at my father's house since he does not drive any longer. He doesn't have Internet access, so I am cut off from the world; the city he lives in is not all that sophisticated to have Internet cafés within walking distance. It may be lesser of a strain and expense to have the whole lot of it shipped to Hungary and we sort it out there. Oh, how I hate re-entry thinking. A diversion is what I need, to ban it from my mind. The Tandanya Aboriginal Museum did the trick; we went to look in their gift shop. Everything there is guaranteed work done by Aboriginal people. We found a small wall hanging called “Men's Ceremony” that was also on sale for 20% off. That and a boomerang will fill our souvenir needs for ourselves. The next stop was the Central Market, after taking a two stop ride on the free inner city loop bus. The market is a humongous place filled with produce stands, butchers, cheese shops, and pre-cooked foods for sale. Aside from the Budapest Central Market being more attractive, next to this one, it looks like a small convenience store. It was mobbed with people shopping for the weekend. The market is closed on Sunday and Mondays. One would think it was a Christmas rush at a give-away sale. Avocados out for sample were creamy, rich in flavor, and ready for eating. We bought a couple of them, a few sweet potatoes, and some sausage with chicken, spinach, cheese, and onion. Ron likes a snack before dinner with a glass of wine, so we found some sharp cheese we sampled, so we bought a piece along with plain crackers. At another stand, we found beautiful bacon to supplement our breakfast. We walked out with our arms full and spent less for two days dinners than we would have for one night in a restaurant.. There is some sort of bicycle race starting here on Monday, but tomorrow is the pre-event, though I have no clue what that means, there are a number of cyclists riding around the city. We returned to the hostel to put our food away in the wall filled refrigerators in our marked bag. Now I am sipping tea and writing while sitting on the balcony of the second floor, shaded and enjoying the breeze. When Ron mentioned he wanted to go on a wine tour, I briefly stated he should go alone since I don't like most wines. He went and booked it for tomorrow for himself without asking me again. I sent him back to book me too. Being Sunday, there will not be much for me to do here alone, so I might as well get to see some of the countryside. They also have an offer that if you spend $100. on travel you get a free hour of Internet that they otherwise charge $4.00 an hour for, but it turned out that one person has to spend $100. on themselves, not combined. Well, I wanted the day out anyway, so the tour should be fun, but in the meanwhile, I am paying $5.00 an hour for WiFi or Internet in any fashion. Our plan is to do laundry on Monday evening. The worst thing when you get home is to have lots of wash to do. The charge is $3.00 for a load of wash and the same for the dryer. We only travel with a small amount of clothes, so one load should do the trick if we combine colors with whites. The dryer can be increased with 20 cent coins. When we get home, the only dirty clothes to worry about will be the ones we are wearing. This is another advantage of traveling with only a carry-on suitcase for five weeks. I left behind three shirts as we went, shirts I had intended to toss or donate anyway. When they used up their usefulness, I left them behind, lighting the suitcase. Conversely, we bought about five t-shirts with slogans on them, so we do have alternative clothes to wear. When we get home though, the clean clothes can be put away and we can recuperate the flights with “no worries” as everyone says here. No worries, mate. No worries, no worries, no worries. No wonder the Australians can afford to be nice and kind. None of them have worries. Must be nice. The other thing that I noticed is that they spell thank you as a closed compound: thankyou or Thankyou. Oh, and gyro or giro is yiro. There are tons of slang words we have had to ask as people used them, but none that I will commit to memory for longer than our flight home. We did not do much after returning earlier. Ron bought at bottle of sparkling shartz wine, so we had a couple of glasses before dinner with the cheese and crackers we bought. The wine went down really well, but the kitchen started turning into a frenzy, so we hightailed it in to start our dinner too. We fried the sausages in a cast iron skillet while microwaving the sweet potatoes. After the sausages were cooked, I cut the sweet potatoes into large chunks and fried them in the balance of the butter from the sausages; the sausage did not have any fat to coat the pan. It was delicious, but we continued drinking the 750 ml bottle of wine with dinner as we sat on the balcony enjoying the breeze. If you don't know how much 750 ml of wine is, let me tell you, I can get shitfaced on 200 ml. This particular wine is sweet, so after a more than a few glasses, I was ready to collapse face first into my dinner dish, reminding me of Ruth Gordon in Where's Papa, an old movie with George Segal. Ron, bless his heart continued drinking, finally finishing off the bottle to save me from myself. His Irish background comes in handy for things like that. Give it to Ron, he will drink anything, reminiscent of the LIFE cereal commercial, “Give it to Mikey, he'll eat anything.” After crawling to the sink to get the dinner dishes done, somehow I miraculously made it back to our room, though I don't remember it spinning before dinner. After resting for an hour, Ron insisted we walk around the block to get our gastric juices the motivation to perform. That was the longest block I walked in five weeks.

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Kangaroo Island to Adelaide

Leaving Kangaroo Island was no hardship for me. I cannot imagine a lifestyle here being cut off from everything. They don't even have the population for a small cinema. There are only 4,000 on the island. Ron was heartily disappointed we did not see any kangaroos or wallabies, so we agreed to get up at 6:00 am to wallaby hunt before the ship back to Adelaide. When the alarm went off, Ron dressed and went looking while I showered, assured he would not have found a thing. When he returned claiming he saw a wallaby, I made him show me pictures before I believed him. He had. We went again and sure enough, we saw the same one, but then three others followed. The difference between a wallaby and a kangaroo is that they are smaller. These wallabies have long tails that are not as powerful as the shorter tailed kangaroo on the island. Satiated with our discovery, we went back to the hostel to check out, walking back to the boat and boarded within fifteen minutes. The return ride did not feature Santa Claus. Perhaps 8:30 am is too early for him to appear. The ride was close to two hours and we walked to the Adelaide Central Youth Hostel from there. Check-in is at 1:00, so we had to leave our things and return later. Sunday is not a booming day in the city. Most everything was closed, but we found activity on Gourge Street and Rumble the pedestrian street. We looked at the Christmas lights, the decorated arcades, and snapped pictures. We stopped for lunch at the Hogs Breath Café, not associated with Clint Easwood's place in Monterey, but they did have menu items like the Dirty Harry burger. This hostel is incredible. The kitchen has twelve work stations, each equipped with a sink, all of the plates, cups, glasses, and silverware you could need. Each also has a four burner stove, a microwave, and cutting boards. The dining and relaxation area has huge dining tables in addition to sofas, soft chairs, and games. On the balcony are tables and chairs for smokers. Most of the evening was spent reading and preparing for our ten hour train ride the next morning.

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Glenelg to Kangaroo Island

Four-thirty am and I am wide awake. One would think that after all of that traveling, I would have been able to get at least eight hours. By six, I was showered and trolling the neighborhood in a direction we had not explored. A few doors down from the hotel is a bakery advertising itself as the best pasty shop in Australia. Having won the award from the Australian Pasty Competition, they can make this claim. At least they are the best amongst those that competed, but yet, I wanted to try for myself. From the pictures, they look like calzones. I would have to wait an hour; they don't open until 7:00am. When Ron climbed out of bed, I went to the breakfast room and he met me there. We have hours to kill until we take the ferry to Kangaroo Island for two nights. The check-out time of this hotel, the Atlantic Tower is an early 10 am. It seems unreasonably early, but by nine, we had our bags stored, on our way out the door. Gleneng is a cute little town, but like most little towns, you can run out of things to do very quickly. We went for a real coffee first. The hotel coffee is only instant. After a stroll to the ocean, we walked through town again, going into book stores, candy stores, Ron ventured into the Discovery Center. This is a museum type place that traces all of the areas history. This area was settled by people who chose to come here, unlike most of Australia, which were prisoners exiled from England. Admission was by donation of a gold coin, which meant one or two dollars, your choice. My choice was not to join him. I walked around and then met up with him thirty minutes later. On the beach, there is a fun house with an arcade totally targeted to children, so we had to venture in. Mostly video games, games of chance with candy as the reward, and a carousel, there was not much to capture the attention of the adult mind other than imagining the fun children would have here. Walking back out along the beach front, a couple was offering camel and donkey rides. The camels looked like they were molting; the donkey was the size of a Labrador Retriever. For $5.00 a person, you could experience riding any of the three animals. People were taking them up on the offer, but I left my camel riding days back in Egypt. One of the churches was open, so we wandered in. It is a “Unifying Church”. Pretty basic inside, there were some handmade banners decorating the walls that were worthy art pieces to draw further notice. We called the Sealink people once again to confirm our pick-up time and location. We arrived at our hotel pick-up by 2:45 for a 3:30 pick-up. They only have two locations in the town, so we chose the closest. By 3:30, concern set in. We had not had what would be called excellent communication with this company thus far. At 3:45, Ron called them again, making us grateful for having a phone. They claimed the van should be there any minute, but they did not have direct communication with the driver. How could that be in this day and age? At 3:50, the van pulled up. The robust woman driver told us she had been waiting for us at the wrong hotel. Finally, she called in on her mobile and was given the correct information. I seem to believe that mobiles can call in both directions. So this van takes us to meet the larger bus of people going to the ship. After a forty-five minute drive, she pulls up to this roadside storefront and tells us that the bus will come for us here; here is the middle of nowhere. Inside, I am panicking. Calling the company has not been productive, so how long do we need to be abandoned here before someone cares to do something productive? With no shade and the sun shining brightly, we waited. A Sealink bus arrived after fifteen minutes, gave us our boarding passes for the ship and off we went to the ferry. The ferry is comfortable and similar to many other ferry services we have traveled. The journey is only a bit over an hour. Today, though this trip had one special traveler, a real celebrity. Santa Claus appeared and had all of the children on board come sit on his lap to tell him their Christmas wishes. Each was rewarded with some candy canes. At the other end, we walked the block and a half to our hostel. Normally, the word hostel brings mixed messages in my mind. We have had both excellent and horrendous experiences with them. The Kangaroo Island hostel looks more like a small hotel than a rabid youth party center. We booked a double room, but strangely our room had three sets of bunk beds. The bottom bed of each was a double with a single bed upper. Theoretically, this room could sleep nine, but for the next two nights, it was only for two. Immaculately clean, the mattresses were inviting. The first order of business was to grocery shop. The selection of restaurants in this area of the island is limited to two that are open and functioning; one of them is a fish restaurant. Our cooking had to be put on hold since the German and Dutch youthful guests took over the kitchen and just about every piece of cooking apparatus. We were finally able to cook our sweet potatoes in the microwave and fried our patties of pork, apricot, and something else that we found ready to cook at the local IGA store. That and a bottle of beer and we were set for the night. Hostel owners Maureen and Ray are gracious hosts, but they disappear after all booked guests are checked in. They did confirm that the Sealink bus would be here to get us at 9:30 am tomorrow morning, but that today, the bus was ten minutes late. We were warned not to panic if it was late again tomorrow. Ron and I decided to sleep separately on either side of the divider wall to facilitate a better nights sleep.

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Back to Fringe

Ron's niece Elise and her friends Nicole and Katie met up with us here in Edinburgh. Elise and Nicole are on a whirlwind tour of Europe, having just graduated from college. They arrived here today and we arranged to meet them at the hostel at 8:00 pm. We took a day trip to Cramond. When I see the pictures, I will remember what we saw. : ) When we did meet up with them, they were already surrounded by seven Italian young men, only one of whom spoke English. It was apparent we were in the way, though the young ladies did ask us to join them and their new friends. I don't think so. Katie and Nicole's luggage was lost by the airline. They were not happy campers.

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