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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 19th, 2003
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The wedding morning was spent doing a bit of everything that comes with the stuff you normally do. Peter and Sunny and I went up to Timberline Lodge to go on a little hike. You can actually see Timberline Lodge in the very first scene of the movie "The Shining" (as they are driving up to the lodge and the scene was filmed from a helicopter). Going on a hike with two Political Science majors, we talked about...politics!

Back at the wedding I was on "hose duty", keeping the parking lot "moist" (MCQ doens't like this word) to keep the dust down.

The wedding was nice, everybody a bit teary, including me. Wow, Craig showing actual human emotion...call the ex-girlfriends and let them know! You can see the pictures below. Bollino and Betsy were all pretty and stuff. Betsy's brother John played guitar and sang a song. Here he was singing with Mt. Hood right over his shoulder.

The reception was a lot of fun. Eating, dancing, telling stories. I can't waltz to save my life I discovered. Later that night Peter put on a bunch of dance tunes. The RSF "I'm too sexy" song came on and people got on this catwalk sorta thing and all did some sort of parade down though the two lines of people. I bolted upstairs where my markers were. I wrote out "LOVE ME!" in big letters across my chest. Ran back downstairs just in time for my turn to parade down trough the people. I did the dance and everyone cheered, but then they really cheered when I unbuttoned the shirt to reveal the letters...then everyone really cheered. Some people though I'd had that on my chest all night, but it was only about 30 seconds. Met this guy named Sam of geek.com fame, nice to have a hardcore nerd discussion session two nights in a row. Ended up konking out out the deck outside, what a fun time the last few days have been.

July 19th, 2003
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