Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

3/23: 10am in Malaysia, 3/22: 7pm in Portland We pulled away a few minutes before 10 and drove to a gas station. Under the RMO, the pumps were operating but the store was closed. Fortunately, I was able to buy a toll tag (a debit card, really) and load it with the amount we were told we’d need for the drive (equivalent to about $15 plus some extra to spare). We got on the highway and drove to a rest area just past the first toll plaza. We waited there for our companions to catch up, coordinating by facebook messenger as a modern day CB radio! For the next three hours or so, we followed them on a nearly-empty super highway with a painfully slow 110kph speed limit. Every five minutes or so a Mercendes saloon would come roaring by going at least 150kph. I mused that it was undercover police since it seemed to be a parade of the same make and model, always tinted windows, etc. KL Rush Hour, COVID-style An interesting feature of the Malaysian freeway: motorbike rain shelters. Ev...

Probably the southernmost site on our trip: Slope Point, New Zealand Everybody was right: the distances in New Zealand are very deceiving. It takes a really long time to go anywhere. I'd guess our typical travel speed has been 45 miles per hour. One funny thing about this is that the national default speed limit is 100 kph (62 mph), which our navigation displays no matter where we are, including this gravel road. Going 42kph in a 100 zone; out the windshield you can see the gravel and in the nav you can see the curves! Anyway, we left Dunedin mid-morning on Wednesday and took about an hour to reach Balclutha on the motorway. We found a lovely municipal park with a picnic table, a great playground and a weird, small zoo. Then it was on to the Nugget Point Lighthouse, where we enjoyed a short hike hoping to see Penguins (no) but got rewarded with some baby sparrows in their nest (in the blind from which we hoped to spot the penguins!) Hoping to see some Yellow-Eyed Pengu...

The pictures of our days in Byron Bay, on the Gold Coast of Australia, are golden. If I was a proper social media propagandist, that's probably all you'd see. But the truth is that these have been hard days and there have been a lot of tears. We left Hamilton in the afternoon on Monday and had an easy, 90-minute flight into Brisbane. There, we rented a mini-van and had our first experience driving on the wrong ("other") side of the road. Fortunately, the airport dumps you directly onto an interstate and that's about the best place to start. I found it about as disorienting as driving the RV because I simply had no idea where the far edge of the vehicle was. Two hours later, with no incident and only one episode of car sickness (poor Cate), we parked at the famous Beach Hotel on, you guessed it, the beach. It is an extremely laid back place. For an arrival night, the good side of this is that the hotel immediately provided an extra cot but the bad side was that...