Stinger Season

What a difference an email can make. I heard from our friend Ludi in Sydney, who pointed out that the period we had planned for the East Coast (North of Brisbane) is

1. the wet season, meaning humid as hell (is hell humid? There's one for the theologians amongst you. Would it put out the fires or make their heat even worse. I don't mind heat as long as it's dry...)
   
2. the stinger season. A stinger is something that lives in the water near the coast. It got its name on account of its tendency to sting people. Oh yeah - their sting kills.

So Melbourne is looking really good right now! And we have some friends there too that we haven't seen in many's the year.

We'll still make it to Brisbane (sorry Simon, we're still coming) but we'll leave it till the last four weeks of our time in Oz as opposed to the middle four.

So now things are looking like this:

4 weeks Sydney (based in one address but day tripping).
4 weeks on the road, in three stages:

1. from Sydney to Melbourne (via the Australian Alps where my Aussie mate Mike here in Cork tells me there are ski stations that specialize in Summer walks - sounds really great).
2. Melbourne back to Sydney via the Coast Road (stopping off in places such as Wilson's Promontory which hopefully won't be completely overrun) and
3. Sydney to Brisbane (I have no idea what we're going to see on this stage.

We're really happy with this plan. The choice of where to go in such a vast place has always been a difficult one, but this feels right.