My 28th Year

I started my 28th year in whale watching in Albany, Western Australia on a road trip with my very best friends .

In the last 12 months I:

• Have progressed my career from Personal Assistant to Senior Program Manager
• Was thrown out of the Belaggio Casino in Las Vegas
• Flew over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter
• Sat silently in the Nevada desert with 60,000 people and watched a temple burn to the ground
• Belted a stranger with a cricket bat
• Drove down Santa Monica Boulevard and partied in the Hollywood hills
• Flew out of an American airport on September 11
• Went to NZ during the Rugby World Cup
• Illegally drove around the South Island of NZ
• Got bogged in a campervan on a remote beach (got rescued)
• Ate a whitebail omelet (seriously it was gross, I don't recommend it)
• Kayaked through the Milford Sound on a sunny day and up to one of the worlds largest waterfalls
• Drove a 1940's Brittish battle tank around an obstancle course
• Fired my first high calibre weapon
• Floated 4km down the icy blackwood river on a rubber tube bought at a petrol station for no good reason
• Went fishing with no bait
• Snuck into my friends parents house and slept in the spare room when my friend wasn't even there
• Went out in Northbridge wearing a tutu and a top hat
• Was in an on-stage sword fight
• Was unanimously elected the Treasuere of the Board of Directors for the company with whom I started as the temp receptionist
• Flew business class to Singapore for free
• Had high-tea at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore
• Ate $180 worth of breakfast
• Had my photo in a Magazine
• Rode a dirt bike for the first time
• Decided I want to spend the majority of my life in WA
• Made love in a jacuzzi
• and fell in love with the most amazing man in the world who just so happens to love me back.

Not a bad year of life.

Waterfalls n natures n stuffs

So uhh... i drank a bunch of wine and have had a kindof big day climbing up nature stuffs. So overall - yesterday sucked the big one because we were meant to go beach camping but bad weather came in and we couldn't go. We went to the beach anyway and mum had a swim and i got caught in the rain.

Today we went to a quarry which was full of gardens and some waterfalls and beaches and more waterfalls and an orchard. They were all maximum extreme pretty natures.

A good day if not an awesome one. Here's some pictures.

Waitangi

Today we decided it was finally time to tackle the greatest challenge presented to us as Australians visiting New Zealand. Maree's driveway.

You see, in order to live in a fabulous treehouse with breathtaking view of harbour, ocean and forrest one must get up high and in order to do so. Maree and Ian have constructed the worlds most terrifying driveway. Complete with twists and hard pounding blind turns, this 500m long atrocity includes dizzying inclines that had the 4WD grasping for grip in 1st gear. But in order to make it to Waitungi - or anywhere in life ever - we were going to have to take the proverbial - if slightly literal - leap.

Maree lent us her trusty Subaru. (Pronounced round these parts as Soo-BAR-oo) we typed our destination into the GPS and i put on an adult diaper. We made it safely down the drive and before ya know it we were on our way to the Waitangi treaty grounds.

Now the Waitangi Treaty is in my opinion a grand thing. A thing that makes me like these kiwi birds more than most people in the world. Its a document that in words far more eloquant and official, says "Dear england, ner ner ne ner nerr you pissy girly pants with your shiny brass buckles can't beat us, can't have our land, but we'll let you come stay at our place so you don't look too bad infront of ya mums".

So we drove out there to give a respectfully belated, psychological  'high five' to the tribes of the Maori for doing what every other country in the world never had the hakas to do.

It was one hell of a windy road though and I must admit the (actually ficticious) adult diaper was handy. Gearing up and down like a boss we flung that soobs around those moutainous corners at 100k's per h and boy was it fun! Also, I got to drive the whole lot as mumsy doesn't actually know how to drive a manual. A skill i only actually picked up about 12 months ago.

So yeh. We went there. It was pretty. We saw a nicely contrived yet still thoroughly entertaining 'cultural show'. Hung out in a cafe that had eels in its pond. Yeh... Eels. blergh. and on the way home we went to a cave that had glow worms in it which was freeekin ace and went for a bush walk through some really nice trees n stuff. The cave had eels too. really freeking big ones. Incidently glow worms are really cool and the glowy bit is essentially fluorescent poop. Falling stars in a glow worms cave means lots of closed mouths and a quiet little cave hike.

Ok thats it for now. tomorrow we're going to the beach and will probably do some more stuff and I'll tell you about that then!

here's some piccies:

sorry no glow worms. they are light sensitive and I didn't wanna give them pink eye.

Aotearoa - The Begining

Well I apologise frends, a packed schedule and limited internet availability meant my burning man odyssey never made it to the www. However, I've been stationary in my home city of Perth for 5 whole months working and making on eo fthose career thingies the other kids have and prepping myself for a little 2 week jaunt into the land of the long white cloud Aotearoa or New Zealand.

I've been here for 2 days. having departed Perth on the good ol' red eye flight we hit Sydney at the lovely time of 6am Thusrday morning. After dragging our sad butts about the airport for a while we found a nice quiet bit of carpet and as I am finding is becomming a travel tradition, curled up on the airport floor with a shirt on my head and had a snoozington. 2 hours later we awoke bleary eyed to the amusment of the Sydney airport staff who were arriving for work.

A few more hours were wiled away and eventually we made it to check in onto an Aerolinas Argetinas flight to NZ. Now, my delightful mummy booked these flights and didn't really do her research so was not to know that Aerolinas Argentinas is South Americas most budget airline, and has a rather sturdy reputation for letting their planes fall abruptly out of the sky. Also, we found ourselves seated next to not one but two new born babies. Ohh it wasn't looking good for the likes of us. But would you believe it? That delightful plane of ours stayed airbourne for all the time it was planned to and those babies chuckled and gurgled hapilly the entire peaceful way! The gods of travel had smiled upon us and our journey was christened with a grand beggining. We had touched down in Aukland and our friend Maree was there to meet us.

Maree met my mummy in Thusrday Island and these two adventurous nursing gals had bunked down together during the Queensland floods last year. Thus forming a life-long bond of friendship that included the delightful perk of free-visiting accomodation - which even extended to close family such as daughters. So Maree whisked us up to her super groovy home designed and built tree house in Whangarei about 2.5 hours drive north of Aukland.

We promptly drank a cuppa ate some diviiine pecan pie and passed out.

the next day Maree and her husband ian took off to work and mummy and I entertained grand plans of exploring the sights of Whangarei. Infact what we did was lounge about in a couple of hammocks for the better part of the day reading our books and marvelling at the views. Maree came home and we went exploring on foot for a bit before tramping out to the local pub for some grub.

Quick update

This is just a quick post so you all know I'm alive and well. We are having far tooo much fun and I am completely shattered. You will have to hold on for more stories. Sorry! ZzZzzzzzZ

T-minus 1 and counting...

With just 1 more sleep till lift off things are getting very twitchy in the toes!

But first lets look back a little on the journey thats lead up to this point.

It started on Xmas night 2010. I was at a friends house after yet another exhausting 40 degree Christmas filled with mixed emotion and over consumption and I'll admit I was miserable as all hell.

I'd just moved back to Perth from 10 glorious months living alone in Broome. I was broke, really broke, living in my dads spare bedroom on a single i didnt fi,t in working as a data entry temp when i could get work, and my dreams of becomming a fashionista enrepenour had taken a turn for the complete fail.

Enter Helen.

Helen and I have known eachother since our nerafious meeting one hungover saturday morning back in 2001. We've been good friends all that time but we've never been back-pocket-buds. Helen was feeling a bit dreary to on account of a story thats not mine to tell. And as you do - with a good friend - we got to talking about ways the world could be a better place if everyone wasn't just a bunch of jerks. And as we together day dreamed about a utopian world where money didn't matter and your job and car were not the difining factor in your identity; (Areas in which Helen and I both were failing badly), we both touched upon the festival of Burning Man. We'd heard about it a bunch of times from wide-eyed associates who espounged ideals of a world of art, expression and community. A place where you could be exactly as strange as you wanted to be without having to show photos of your kids and discuss mortgage prices.

And a bottle or two of champagne later we'd made a commitment. We'd go to the 2011 Burning Man Festival in Nevada. We'd get ourselves jobs and get our shit together. We'd embrace our inner wierdo for the next 8 months and psychicly slap any jerk who thought they could hold us back from reaching our utopia.

And that we did. We've spent months improving our careers so we could afford this extravagant little expidition in such a short turn around.  And we've spent many a weekend sampling our BM costumes and wistfully streaming Burning Man Radio and California dreamin' through the rainy winter months.

We've put together a killer itinerary with the support of our beloved American compadre Tim who will be meeting us when we step off in LA. And tomorrow... tomorrow we take off - tutu's packed -  in search of a better world.

First stop Aukland.

6 sleeps till lift off!

This is just a quickie post to get this little baby up and running again. Above you'll see the map of the Californian coast with some points marked out. Those are the travel checpoints for myself and the devine Miss Helen on our Road Trip extravaganza of America.

Its late at night now and its taken me hours to redesign this new bloggie so I'm off on some z's but stay tuned kiddies! Nadia's getting Tribal again!

I explain more about this poor fella later: