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.
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).
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.
Craig
Took today off. Mostly did odds and ends all day, like get this travel site up to date...and get it online again. The DNS got hosed along the way, taking the site down and two of my email accounts. Oh well.
There was a large dinner going on at the Convent. Seems they had mass and then this dinner was afterwards. I didn't know if I should have been drinking wine there last night, but there were two blocks of beer at the dinner...so I guess not. The dinner was to raise money for a camp that the Grade 6 kids go on. The kitchen was really busy because of this, so I had to wait a litte while to make dinner. One of the women gave me a piece of cheesecake. I read the paper and went upstairs to get the travel site up to date.
Normally this would have been a quiet day...but nope, there is more. I'm clacking away on the laptop in my room. I heard footsteps on the verandah outside coming closer to my door, followed by a "whump whump whump" sound on the door. I open it and there are two copys standing there. They said a large amount of money was stolen about 20 minutes ago and they wanted to come in and "have a look around". I told them I'd been up here for the last hour, but they could come in. Normally I'm not keen on this, but I'm in another country and would hate to get booted out after biking this far. Cop #1 went though all my stuff, opening everything up. Cop #2 did the "nice cop" routine and asked me about the biking trip and whatnot. It reminded me of hearing Jello Biafra's second spoken word album where he talks about the FBI cops tearing his place apart while the "nice" cop says things like "so do you make a lot of money being a rock star?" Anyway, they looked at my MSR fuel bottle for my campstove and asked what that was for. Cop #1 seemed annoyed that they he didn't find anything. I really wanted to ask if I could take a picture but didn't want to push my luck. It's a good thing I mailed those 30 license plates home yesterday! They left awhile later, and left me with another problem...about 30,000 mosquitoes made their way into my room since the cops left the door open. I tried to sleep but kept hearing this loud buzzing noise. Ended up getting up about 1:30am and went on a massive moquito killing spree.