30 images from Down Under

I've spent the last two months in Australia and New Zealand. Here are my comings and goings in the land of Aus, with NZ to come.

My travelogue has been quiet lately but I continue to work remotely with some excellent support back home.

I had at least one person cancel their subscription after I sent my last travel post (on Sept. 4) about French Polynesia and Fiji, saying they didn’t want to pay for a travel blog. Let me be clear: This is bonus content. It’s free, and you don’t have to read it. It is not getting in the way of me posting business columns at least weekly.

I have created a new section: Comings & Goings Travel. If you do not want to receive these travel posts, you can customize your subscription by going to the notifications area of your subscription page and turning off “Comings & Goings Travel” from there. Likewise, for my out-of-town friends who care only about the travel, you can flip the Comings & Goings button. I can’t do this for you but if you are having trouble, let me know.

My newly retired husband and I spent September on Australia’s east coast, between Brisbane and Melbourne, and October in New Zealand. Then, we went back to Australia for four days to Cairns, on the north coast, to see the Great Barrier Reef. It shortened our travel time to Indonesia, where we are now. I wanted Australia to be complete before I posted about it, which is why it’s been a while. These images are posted in order from when we started in Brisbane to when we concluded in Cairns. I’ll fill you in on New Zealand in a few days. Stay tuned!

Note: Because of the length of this email, you may see three dots at the end. Click on “View entire message,” because if you’ve made it that far, you don’t want to miss the underwater Great Barrier Reef photos.

All but the underwater photos were taken by me. Those photos were by the boat’s photographer, and were all things that we saw while snorkeling that day.

Streets Beach is a human-made attraction. This is just one part of the lagoon.

Scott and I were in Brisbane right before its Brisbane Festival. Here, we’re under a colorful blowup arch on one of the city’s bridges.

View of downtown Brisbane from a ferry that crosses the river.

Brisbane City Botanical Gardens, during the day and during the Afterglow event, which was part of the Brisbane Festival. It opened the night before the festival.

An Australian White Ibis in the botanical gardens.

Sunset over Coffs Harbour.

I try to find yoga when I travel. Here’s the sunrise view from a studio in Forster.

View of the ocean from Forster.

Sydney at night.

Sydney Harbour with my friend Annette and her husband Peter. Annette was a Lions Club exchange student who stayed with my family in Grass Valley when we were in high school.

Surfers at dusk in Woollongong.

Claude and Maude are the resident Rainbow Lorikeets at the place we stayed in the Fitzroy neighborhood of Melbourne. They came to visit every morning after we put out a handful of plain sunflower seeds provided by our host.

Train views of the mustard fields between Woollongong and Albury.

Melbourne has embraced graffiti as art.

Windmills at the Melbourne Museum.

Phar Lap is the most famous Australian race horse He lifted the country’s spirit during the Great Depression. Here he is – stuffed!

Sunrise over Cairns.

A Masked Lapwing in the Cairns mudflats. The city doesn’t really have a beach. It has a lagoon, kind of like Brisbane’s human-made beach and pool.

Michaelmans Cay, above, and in video, below.

A tomato clown and blue sea star.

The giant clams were amazing. Probably the favorite thing we saw snorkeling.

Our final day was spent at the Cairns Aquarium. This Red-Clawed Crayfish was my favorite tenant.

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