Travel is the gift that keeps on giving. The more you travel, the more at home you feel all over the world. So even though we were 10,000 miles from our domicile this Thanksgiving, we could still enjoy a traditional meal with friends in our home. This trip is our fourth to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. We lived in this city for 8-week stints in 2016, 2017, & 2018, when I was lucky enough to direct my employer's foreign study program. Four years felt like a long gap, unt

In some ways, the past 4-5 months have felt like a holding pattern. We launched our nomadic life in January, bouncing around Europe until June. The summer and early Fall did not go completely the way we had planned, and on October 2 we boarded a ship headed for Australia by way of Pacific Islands along the way. The journey became a way to ease back into our nomadic life, but slowly and contemplatively. Having spent the first part of the year in some of our European "bucke

These are the last of the photos from the cruise. I posted a photo album Seattle to Hawaii. I've also posted a lot of the Pacific Island photos in the "Mountains on One Side, Ocean on the Other" post and some in the post about food in the ports. Here are the remaining photos from Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea and also photos from Cairns and Airlie Beach in Australia. In Samoa, the highlight of our one-day visit was the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum. Paul to

We are nearing completion of our first long cruise. We have spent the past 35 nights on board the ms Westerdam, a Holland America ship, voyaging from Seattle, USA to Sydney, NSW Australia. We have met a lot of people who have cruised many times on Holland America, and in the main they really like this cruise line. Some of them have mentioned that post-Pandemic, things were not quite as smooth as usual, and the food is not quite as elegant as usual, but to a person they hav