What happened between then and now...

We drove. Or more specifically, the person with a licence drove. We left Brisbane on a Wednesday and drove down the Pacific Highway. We drove to Surfers and jumped in the water to say goodbye to Queensland. We went past Byron Bay and stopped at Coffs Harbour for the night - which was sadly over developed and full of fast food outlets. On Thursday I drove until I collapsed in a heap in Newcastle, which was about as pretty as Coffs Harbour but far less disappointing. On Friday morning we made good time to Sydney (aside from a panic attack on the Sydney Harbour Bridge after which I needed to pull over and have a deep breath - Sydney-siders would do well to learn some patience and etiquette from Queensland, I must say), where we met up with Jonathan and his good lady wife Denise. We saw Stuart briefly, Matt Wlazlo came out of the wood work, and Angus was there too. Friday was a blur. Saturday we went and saw Immortal, and there we saw Trent, Alex, Luke, Anthony, and a whole bunch of other people we knew. Sunday, we drove to Dapto and saw my Aunt Mary, who was so very kind to us, and we then stayed the Monday in Canberra. I went to the National Gallery and experienced the kind of disappointment that I have only ever experienced before in Tokyo when I found the fabled 'Godzilla statue' and it was only 40cm high. Just pitiful really, considering that we went several hundred kilometres out of our way to find this moderately sized collection that lacked any real balls. We jumped in the car on Tuesday and drove again, this time to Jindabyne, where we had a pleasant evening in a youth hostel with a bottle of wine and a pizza. We drove on to Thredbo, where we took a brief diversion up Mount Kosciusko and took in some air from the highest point in Australia. We then drove through the hair-raising hair-pin bended road from Thredbo to Khankoban, on to Woodonga. At Woodonga I checked my pulse, bought a big bottle of regular cola, and floored it all the way down the Hume highway. We hit Melbourne on Wednesday evening, just before I was getting to the crazy-crashing-the-car-lady tiredness threshold. We spent four nights in Melbourne (including one in a lovely hotel with a beautiful sparkling city view), and we caught up with Monika, Ben Butcher, Liz Clark, Laurel, Gianni Abbate, Sam and his lovely lady friend, Lach, Lou, Timmy T and a few others before jumping on a day sailing to Devonport on the Spirit of Tasmania. A word from the wise: DON'T TAKE THE BOAT unless you can not possibly avoid it. It is full of really horrible obnoxious bogans of all sorts of descriptions, and it just doesn't warrant thinking about. We were put up by Al Sainsbury for the night in Promised Land that evening. The next day we gunned it to Hobart. And here we are. In Hobart. AGAIN.

And if it seems like a lot of words to put in one paragraph, I did so because it was a lot of kilometres to do in that space of time, and I realise now that most people these days will never drive as far as I just drove in a manual car with no cruise control. It's hard work, and I would have liked to have a rest after all of that. But that never seemed to happen. From the moment I got back here, there was something doing every moment of every day. Right now I am sitting at work, which is the closest I have gotten to having a rest, in a sunny corner in my office at the Department of Justice in Rosny, waiting for my supervisor to give me some more work. So, well may you ask: "how does this relate to the ongoing mission to get to Japan?" - and the answer is: without the Department of Justice, I would never go anywhere.

Before departing for Brisbane, I was briefly employed as a receptionist in the Department of Justice for the Resource Management and Planning Appeals Tribunal. Kept me out of poverty and in food well enough to get us on the plane and up to Brisboring, where after five months of misadventures and misplaced hope, we finally found ourselves a job in Japan, teaching English for ECC. Once we had found the job in Japan, we were only too happy to run away from Brisbane. We were under the illusion that we might stay with Tom's mother and save some money once we got back to Hobart, but due to it being a bit far away from everything, we ended up having to move out of Carlton Beach and into South Hobart so that we could work. And boy, did I get a job. Policy Division, Workplace Standards, Department of Justice. Helping write regulations. Big stuff. Bigger than the Office for Women policy work that I had done before in Brisbane, bigger than the Information Science and Technology project I had undertaken at Economic Development... and I thought writing ministerial briefs was big cookies. That's nothing compared to the nightmarish proportions of writing the regulations for the Occupational Licencing Act. Tom has also gotten himself a job at the Department of Justice, at the Magistrates Court in Hobart doing administration stuff. Funnily enough, we have once again gotten the same employer (we both worked for the Australian Passport Information Service, be it at different times, and we both worked for the Department of Child Safety in Brisbane).

Now, to pay for our living expenses whilst we were unemployed for those four weeks there and the tickets to Japan, we went quite a fair bit under zero on the credit card, and now we are scrambling like mad to try and make it back to zero before the interest kicks in. I have never paid any interest on my credit card before, and I don't plan on starting paying credit card companies money any time soon either! I'm a bit nervous about it all, and before Tom found himself a job, I was really nervous, but this week we will both receive our first full sized pay packets from our respective jobs.

I was driving back from a barbecue at Marion Bay the other day when a giant kangaroo leapt out in front of me on the road, and unfortunately, our car was mangled a bit. Now we're in a desperate frenzy to cover the repairs, change the registration, pay for the plane tickets, sell the car and try to catch up with all of the merry people that have come out of the woodwork to see us whilst we are in town briefly, and to be perfectly honest, I don't think I will be able to have a single moment to myself until I'm on the plane to Osaka.

And that plane leaves on 5 June, so the timeline is frighteningly short.

I will try and upload some photos soon, but you know it’s hard when you don’t have any internet access at home.