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Biking Around Australia

Between February 2002 and March 2003 I circumnavigated 12,504 miles around the Australian continent on my bicycle, or push bike as they say there. After that I went to New Zealand for three months and met up with a friend and ended up pushing the total mileage to 14,115.7 miles (22717.02 km). I spent 269 days on my bike, 272 days not on my bike, and getting 67 flat tires over those 17 months.

This is the route I took around Australia. Every few days I would update this YHA map with a marker and the route I more or less made up as I went along.
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I started and ended my 13 month lap around Australia at Luna Park in St. Kilda/Melbourne.. The distance around Australia (including Tasmania) ended up being about 20,281km (12,600 miles).

February 12th, 2002 - 3:50pm
March 12th, 2003 - 3:12pm
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I carried a 15 pound IBM Thinkpad 600E with five batteries over the course of the entire trip in order to keep this website updated on a weekly basis so people back home could follow me on my travels. I had a system setup where I'd back the photos up to CDs and mail them home every few weeks. To update the site, I primarily did it with 3.5 inch floppy disks. There are 542 daily journal entries on here. I redid the website in 2020 so it would show up on phones and such ok. I took 36,304 photos over the 17 months and 12321 of them ended up here on this website. As for the words, there are 119527 of them for you to read. I didn't start active journaling until a couple months into the journey. I've noted where I've added journal entries way after the fact based on recollections or notes I had from the time. Some people have actually read the the entire site and have seen every picture. Some entries were written the same day, others were not. Some entires are a thought-provoking and a wholly entertaining read, others are downright boring.
Lunky.com website 2001-2020


The MS Paint image I updated every few days
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Also during the journey I carried a cardboard "clock" for this website I had started a year earlier called The Human Clock. Here it is on the Queensland/Northern Territory border
The Human Clock website was pretty popular then and it plus my bike trip got a quick blurb in the Sunday Times of London in September of 2002
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One fun thing I did during my trip was to visit six "confluences", which is where a whole-numbered latitude/longitude mark intersects for The Degree Confluence Project.

This was also back when the GPS looked nice
Standing at 18°S 142°E
Thanks for reading!
Craig
July 26th, 2002
day-175_palmer-river-roadhouse
QueenslandPalmer River Roadhouse
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6836.13 km total
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4238.1 mi total

Got up today and was put to work pretty fast. They wanted me to whip up some breakfast for the five of us. Some customers came and ordered food in just as I was finishing the breakfasts. The kitchen was a bit of mayhem since nobody really knew where anything was.

Spent the rest of the afternoon doing my required task of setting up the computer and moving furniture. Around 6pm Kevin found me outside and asked if I could make some about 10 teas for everyone. I thought it was an odd request but I still got everything set up. Kevin walked into the kitchen a bit later and said "no...steaks! T-Bone steaks...'T's'... what do you call them in the States?" "Steaks" I replied. Ended up being hamburgers that I had to cook...because then I could bust out my long lost burger skills from 10 years ago when I worked at the Red Robin. It was funny how I never really forgot it. I had to cook for about ten people so there was a lot to do. It was actually just like the restaurant in that I had a zillion things going on at once and started delegating orders out to the owners (e.g. "figure out how to get the damn stove working... need to keep stuff warm!"). After probably the busiest hour I've had in the last six months, I had everything done. Everyone liked the food and said "not bad for a Yank"...that was pretty cool.

Sounds like tomorrow is going to be quite an event...glad I'm sticking around. Went out by the fire, a couple of guys were talking about common experiences with their past wives..."second one did that...yeah, my third one did that!", it was pretty cool.

July 26th, 2002
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