It’s been another month since either of us wrote anything and Stu is nagging again (though, as he went to the trouble of setting this blog up for us and sorting out all our problems with it, I guess he has the right to moan when we don’t use it!) so I’m here to give a quick update, though there’s only so much to say…
 I finished work last Tuesday and last Friday - as I’ve been working 2 jobs I got double the thanks in speeches and double the pressies! I really had a great experience at both schools and they will certainly stand me in good stead for the return to work in September. That said, I’ve now got another 4 months off so I may be well out of the habit again by the time September comes around. As you can probably tell from that, we have decided, after much deliberation, that we are going to return to Blighty in August as was originally planned and make full use of our round-the-world ticket (more on that in a minute). I was sad to leave both jobs but it’s good to know that there’s 2 offers of work available if (when?!) we decide to return to Sydney.
As for Rich, he’s got another 3 weeks in the working world before his holidays begin again (the start of the school holidays meant that I had to finish earlier than him). His company have also been pretty impressed with him and would like him to stay in Oz to keep working for them, but we’ve realised the whole idea of just not coming home is really rather impracticle! He’s working extremely long hours at the moment trying to get finished the stuff he has started before we head off on the next leg our trip so I’m just hanging around Sydney on my own again like I was in January. Still, he is paid by the hour!
I have taken the spare time as an opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do since going on my Uncle’s boat in Canada when I was considerably younger than I am now - I’m learning to sail - Thanks to mum and dad for the lessons which they bought me as a birthday present, and yes, for the next birhday “I want a yacht, daddy!” I had my first lesson on Saturday when the weather was beautiful. Unfortunately, beautiful weather often isn’t accompanied by strong winds and we had to spend the morning covering theory and knots - I do a mean reef and an even better bowline, though the others now seem to have slipped my mind and will probably slip from the ropes when I attempt them again in the next lesson. In the afternoon, after lunch on the boat, we got out on the water and started to really sail. We were gybeing and tacking (good - these are ways to turn the boat to catch the wind) and skirting (bad - this is when the sail gets caught up) and by the end of the 6 hours, I had a fairly sound idea of what to do when manning my rope - I’m not sure how i’ll cope if they put me on a different rope though. We also learnt to anchor and some of the directional and technical terms but I think I need to do some more reading on some of these as I was left a bit confused by the whole idea of who has right of way and why.
 Rich has continued with his photography course over the past 5 weeks and tonight is the student show so we’ll be going along to that to see everyone’s work - he seems to have really enjoyed it and continues to drive me mad with wanting to stop to take photos everywhere we go. I’m sure this will only get worse once we hit the new sights of the Outback and New Zealand.
Which brings me on to the next part of our adventure… We will be leaving Sydney on the 6th May and flying to Alice Springs. From here we plan to take a short tour around Uluru - we’ve found a company that looks as though it goes the extra mile out of the way to get away from the crowds a bit in the outback as well as covering the major sites in the area. They also seem more concerned with the Aboriginal connections to the land and include talks from the local custodians of the land at a couple of the sites we will visit. Then we’ll take a tour up from Alice Springs to Darwin over the course of 6 days. This includes a tour of Kakadu National Park.
 The following week is entirely dependent on my bloody allergies and whether they’ve cleared up - I have been seeing a specialist to treat the allergies and have even been to a Chinese herbalist and am drinking the foulest concoction you could possible imagine three times a day to try to deal with the trouble my lungs and sinuses are giving me - why, you may ask, am I putting myself through this and spending extortionate amounts of my travel budget on it? Well, it’s because I still plan to dive the Great Barrier Reef before I come home. I hope that, after all this treatment and a couple of weeks out of Sydney, my boy will have recovered sufficiently fo me to be able to dive again. If it has, we’ll be going back to Cairns; if it hasn’t I’ll be very despondent and will either hang around in Darwin for a week or so, come back to Sydney for a bit, or head over to the West for a week - perhaps to Perth.
And that will be the end of the Aussie stint of our trip - a very scary thought - and we will be on the return leg. We’ll be spending a month or so in New Zealand, a week or so in Fiji then whatever time we’ve got left in the States. We’ll let you know more when we know it. Â
Hopefully, like the deer the python ate on ‘Life in Cold Blood’,  this has satisfied your hunger and will keep you going for 3 weeks when we will, obviously, have far more to say and will be updating far more regularly as out lives will (hopefully) once again be filled with back to back adventures!Â
