Next Chapter Travels

What sounded pretty straight forward in the Workaway listing turned out to be anything but. Not in a bad way, just in a very interesting, unusual and intriguing way.   Where to be begin?   Mark and Jody drove me all the way to the farm/rescue center. It is a large house sitting on 110 acres and currently houses 23 rescue wombats, ducks, birds, sheep, donkeys, dogs, and wallabies. The couple who own and run the place are in their 70’s. Lyn explained in the first five minutes that she does this work as a payback for surviving leukemia.   The couple also care for two of their grandchildren (I think they are from Don’s children). The children, 5 and 2, live here full time but occasionally visit a parent. So imagine a house where there is a high chair at the kitchen counter, a busy little 5 year old demanding attention, 12 baby wombats needing to be bottle fed, two very young wallabies needed feedings every four hours, one wombat with an injured foot who needs special care and...

Lyn Chalmers started Locky's Legacy wildlife   shelter 16 years ago. It is named after a little Brushtail possum who passed away overnight unexpectedly in his sleep. Locky’s Legacy is located approximately 10km north of Pakenham, Australia and covers approximately 5.9 hectares of hilly, native bushland with a dam and a creek running through the end of the property, providing a vital water source for wildlife.   I had the honor of helping with the animals for one short week in November 2023. One of the baby wombats died yesterday. He had been found in its mother’s pouch after she had been hit by a car. The death of a baby wombat that has been rescued wouldn't be particularly noteworthy in the bigger scheme of things. This one was a little different story. Lyn had taken Tom (not his real name) in when he was quite young. She bottle fed him and cared for him along with the dozen other baby wombats in her care at the time. Lyn is an immensely caring person and believes every anima...

Kookaburras and cockatoos are setting the background track this evening. A storm rolled in after I got back to the Discovery Holiday park. I decided to not go back to town for dinner as planned. I am feeling sort of lost between the layers. Steamboat in Echuca I could fly to somewhere outside of Australia and re-enter for another 90 days. It is oddly appealing and yet I wonder if that is just me responding to Jody’s enthusiastic suggestion that I go help her daughter with the house build. I could. I would be expensive. I also feel like I should go home. Arriving home on December 5th, I will probably only be there three months before going to South Africa.   I like helping people with projects. Getting to Mark’s house and having Jody so excited to get a little help in her garden felt really good. I weeded a couple of hours and she was so happy to have it done, we spent the whole next day working together. It was fun, plain and simple.   Just like clearing out Kelly’s greenhouse...

Passport missing?!?! All packed up and ready to leave the Ashbolt Farm, I went to do the regular visual check of passport and vital documents.Standard operating procedure, I do it every time I leave a place. This time it is not standard; I can’t find the passport or the passport holder with the Nexus Card or my vaccine record. I also can’t find the back-up wallet with the back-up credit card. I tore everything apart three times. I searched drawers, I searched the entire little cabin. None of it is there. It must be at the Airbnb in Hobart, right? Tried to call. This is the day that the entire Optus network is down. The VP of Optus got fired for the massive outage. What it meant to me was that instead of heading north, I took the bus all the way back to Hobart to see if the passport was in a drawer in room #2. It wasn’t. I took everything out of everything two more times.  Fast forward - I racked my brain, asked the host to search, went through my things a few more times, racked my...

I want to try to capture how bazar this workaway gig has been. I’m going to try to tell it backwards to not lose the oddness of today. At dinner last night, I asked what A would like done today. She was unclear and provided nothing specific for me to work from. When I got back from the Mona Museum, she was on hands and knees weeding one of the front flower beds Spencer and Kelsey and I had weeded. Some stalks of grass were bothering her. As she had said MANY times before - you have to pull them before they go to seed or they become a bigger problem. I refrained from voicing the obvious- the yard is surrounded by this grass. Pulling a few more in the flower bed is not going to make a difference. Compared to the tarp loads of weeds we had pulled out, she had only a small collection. Still, I was offended and a little irritated for about 2 seconds. At dinner last night, I asked what A would like done today. She was unclear and provided nothing specific for me to work from. When I got back...

2 nights? I left Harvey Bay on Friday. I had only booked one night at Jen’s Getaway in the Glass House Mountains. I had plans to take the bus to Ocean Shores on Monday. My only plan in between was to do a little hiking and exploring in the Glass House Mountain area. It should not have been a surprised that there were two more nights between Saturday and Monday. I woke up early and took a very hot bath, trying to fix my back/neck issue.  Had breakfast at Jen’s and headed to Nguyen Mt, the closest and possibly easiest of the Glass House Mt hikes. The 1.25 mile round trip was mostly rock stairs and a little scramble at the top. There were so many people and it started to rainy lightly while I was enjoying the view. Still, it was pleasant and a great way to wake up the body after the relative inactivity in Harvey Bay.   With the weather cooler and raining, I wasn’t in a hurry to head to the Sunshine Coast. I drove north to the Malena Botanic Gardens and Bird World. The dr...

 Land Use Planning A long time ago, before anyone invented the term tiny house, it occurred to me that it would really simplify things if we looked at cemeteries with multi-use in mind. A triple wide plot could hold a small three story building. With a little planning, the floor-plan could accommodate both the living and the dead. For example, instead of a root cellar, the space under the house could be reserve for the departed. If the family favored cremation, the capacity would easily be sufficient for a few generations. Now that tiny house designs have been through plenty of iterations, the interior design of a simple residence sized to fit the family plot could take advantage of space saving innovations like never before. Couple that with a growing trend towards more experiences and less stuff, we find an easy step to the dual-purpose land use-Tiny home Park/Cemetery. The only thing missing is utilities which could be addressed with solar power, composting toilets and rainwater...

  early start I had one full day to see the sights of Guatemala City. I had coffee and called an UBER to take me to the Constitution Plaza where I would start the day of sightseeing. The square held very few people and lots of pigions. There was a large group that look like a school field trip so I was able to learn a litte more about the square by eavesdropping on their guide. There didn't appear to any other tourist, the street vendors were relaxing under a tree. A very helpful person in the tourist info kiosk gave me a nice overview of the city, along with a map and reassurnce that the areas I wanted to visit we save at that time of day. The buildings were interesting, nice example of Spanish architecture. There are many examples of Spanish architecture in this city. Having seen lots of Spanish architecture in Spain, it didn't really seem that interesting. To me, the buildings marked invasion by the Spaniards and the end of much of the indigenous culture. The UBER driver ha...

Arrived in Guatemala City at 5:20 am after an  uneventful day of travel. The only options on Delta were overnight flights that arrived very early, not my first choice because i don't like to start a trip tired. Oh well. No trouble finding the pre-arranged taxi outside the airport. There was heavy traffic to hotel, even at the early hour. Checked into the Hilton and went right to bed. The 4 hour flight between LAX and Guatemala City was too short for any chance of real sleep and way to short for sleep aids. A nice 5 hours of sleep at the hotel let me get caught up and back in sync with the rest of the day. Pretty much every resource comments on the dangers of Guatemala City. First mission of the day was to go out and access the area to get a feel for how to manage risk. For me, this includes checking with the reception desk to ask for the local perspective. The next step is to simple dress inconspicuously, carry no touristy purse or backpack and then simply venture out in the middle...