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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 10th, 2003
day-524_wellington-new-zealand
New ZealandWellington
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22185.52 km total
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13759.4 mi total

Today started out a little funny. You see, I have my bike all boxed up but I don't know how much it weighs. I walked around awhile yesterday trying to find a scale. MCQ and I did discover one down in the Cuba street mall. You put your 10 cents in and it tells you your weight. Soo...MCQ being the nice guy he is helped me truck my bike box all the way down the street to weigh it. 33kgs the box weighed, only 1kg over. I spent some more change to figure out what to pull out of the box. We got back awhile later, packing the bike via arms and eventually on our heads.

We left awhile later to go climbing down at the climbing wall. That was a lot of fun, though my arms sure aren't used to it. On the walk back I picked up some presents for people. MCQ got great video of me lip synching outside of a karoke bar to some girl Phil Collins' "One More Night".

Watched Raging Bull tonight, it was good. Can't belive that a week from now I'll be drinking beer with everyone at Bollino's 30th birthday party.

Whoah, weird. Today when MCQ and I were walking I thought of how in Australia I was riding and the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" came on the radio and I thought of how my friend Pete back home would always dance and sing around to that song. I couldn't remember exactly where it happened though. I was fixing something in the database for this entry and discovered that it was exactly a year ago that the "spice girls event" had happened. (july 10th, 2002). Weird. The other day I started singing the "Greatest American Hero" theme song when MCQ and I were walking down the stairs. 30 minutes later we were talking ot a friend of Becki's and her mobile phone went off....with the Greatest American Hero theme song as the ringtone. sheesh.

July 10th, 2003
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