Australia by bus - June/ July 1981

In June and July 1981, at the age of sixteen, I traveled to Australia with my family-of-origin (parents, siblings) for a month-long trip there. On the way there we also saw some of Hawaii and the western U.S. To get around Australia, we bought bus passes covering the network then run by a company called Ansett Pioneer. We flew into Townsville, Queensland from Hawaii and began and ended the trip in Townsville. The resulting trip was extensive and covered approximately 11,000 bus miles though every one of Australia's mainland states, and every one of those states' capital cities. This gave me an extensive look at this huge and beautiful country with so much unique scenery and wildlife. Some of the highlights of the trip included Ayers Rock and the Olgas (in the center of the country); numerous koala bear and wildlife parks; Magnetic Island off the coast of Queensland; the Great Barrier Reef; the Nullarbor Plain; the Gold Coast; and the government buildings in Canberra. We also got to see the famed Beer Can Regatta in Darwin. The geographer in me noted at the time that at the farthest point in the trip- Fremantle, Western Australia - we were very close to the "antipodal" point (i.e. the polar opposite point on the globe) to where I was living at the time on the U.S. East Coast.

None of this should not be taken to mean that this trip was easy, or merely some nice rest and relaxation. Some of the bus rides were up to 36 hours long, meaning that we had to sleep aboard the buses. There was also a lot of walking and busy sightseeing during the visits to the cities. Also - this being 1981 - smoking was allowed aboard the buses, a great inconvenience for someone like me who has always been a nonsmoker. About a third of Australian adults were smokers at the time of my trip, and many of them seemed to find their way onto my bus rides. The company made some attempts to segregate smokers and nonsmokers but this didn't really work. How unpleasant this was really depended on how many people were on the bus rides, and who you got. Sometimes the bus drivers themselves were smokers. Fortunately, in most countries, this type of transport is all non-smoking now, so this problem hopefully will not recur in any of my present or future travels.

Map of bus itinerary around Australia, which took 29 days and about 11,000 miles. This was taken from a trip log that I kept daily during the actual trip. This map is pretty orderly, but some of my other entries are messy, as I would often try to write them while aboard the bus and being jostled about during the ride. I had seen plenty of gum trees, desert, and kangaroos by the time all this was over.

One of many koala bears we met on this trip; this one was at a park in Adelaide, South Australia.

Flinders Street Station, a landmark of Melbourne, Victoria.

Dramatic coastal cliffs near South Australia - Western Australia border.

Coastal road at sunset along the Indian Ocean north of Perth, Western Australia.

Downtown Townsville, Queensland. This was our Australian starting and ending point for the trip.

Up-close view of the Olgas, a rock formation in the Northern Territory near Ayers Rock.











Ayers Rock, Northern Territory, viewed from the east. Along with Sydney Opera House and the Great Barrier Reef, this has to be one of Australia's most well-known tourist attractions.

Downtown Perth.

One of the buses that I rode during the journey. This was at a rest stop in Western Australia.

The Three Sisters, a rock formation located in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney.

View of Sydney Harbour from the namesake Harbour Bridge, which has a pedestrian walkway that we took. The Opera House is easily seen at right.

Close-up view of Sydney Opera House.

This is a jellyfish that washed onshore while we were at Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast (Queensland).

View from an underwater observatory at Green Island, Queensland (just offshore from Cairns). The foreground shows a large golden-colored coral formation.








Wild, bumpy catamaran ride aboard the "Big Cat", going from Cairns to Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

Mileage sign in Townsville.

This is the Qantas 747SP jet that took me from Townsville to Honolulu. Here the jet is parked at Honolulu's airport, with the extinct Diamond Head volcano visible in the far distance.

Canada - Atlantic Provinces, Ontario, Quebec - June 1980

In June 1980, I went on a car trip with my family-of-origin (parents, siblings) through much of eastern Canada. I was fifteen years old at the time. I had visited Ontario and Quebec on many other trips which are not specifically listed in my travel blog, but this trip remains to date my only visit to the Atlantic Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island (PEI), and Newfoundland. Highlights visited on this trip included Toronto, Montreal, Quebec (city), Charlottetown (PEI), Halifax and Peggy's Cove (Nove Scotia), Cape Breton Island and the Cabot Trail (Nova Scotia), and Corner Brook and Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland. There were car ferry rides between New Brunswick and PEI, and between North Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland.

Welcome to Port-aux-Basques! This is the town in southwestern Newfoundland where the car ferry drops you off, if you are coming from Nova Scotia.

Roosevelt Cottage at Campobello Island, New Brunswick.This represents the summer retreat of the family of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The site is now an International Park.

Scenery along the coastal Cabot Trail in northern Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

Downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Chateau Frotenac, a famous hotel and landmark in Quebec (city).

St. Joseph's Oratory, a large and famous church in Montreal, Quebec.

Barren treeless landscape along southern Newfoundland's coast near Port-aux-Basques. Years later, when I saw Iceland, that reminded me a bit of this scenery. However, things change as you head north: inland Newfoundland is heavily forested.

Europe rail trip (16 countries) - June/ July 1979

In June and July 1979, when I was fourteen years old, I traveled with my family-of-origin (parents and siblings) to mainland Europe for six and a half weeks. We had Eurailpasses (which allowed unlimited travel in Europe's rail network through the participating countries) and rode trains all over the continent, visiting a total of sixteen countries: Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Germany (then known as West Germany), Belgium, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Monaco. Italy, Vatican City, Spain, and Portugal. This was my first trip outside North America, and that, combined with my young age and enormous scope of the trip, guaranteed an unforgettable experience which helped shape my personal development and view of the world, and my interest in travel today. That is not to say it was an easy or luxurious trip: to save money on such a long journey, we traveled with limited means, using backpacks, and often slept on trains overnight during lengthy travel segments. At one point we even slept on benches outside a train station when we had a 6-hour overnight layover and there were no places available to stay in town. We ate mainly out of bakeries and convenience shops. Occasionally we would eat a restaurant meal, and stay in a hotel so we could shower and clean off. Back then there was no euro, so that meant frequent money exchanges (with often long lines) between all the countries listed above. On a couple of rail segments, our train was loaded into the hull of a ship and transported across water (e.g. Copenhagen to Hamburg, Germany). The Eurailpasses covered a few other boat rides, such as Helsinki-to-Stockholm and a Rhine River cruise, and they also covered a 200-mile bus ride through Bavaria in Germany. At one point near the trip's end, we took a taxi from Rennes, France, to the Normandy coast so we could see Mont St. Michel.

The geographic scope of the trip involved about 17,000 rail miles, and extended from the arid plains of southern Spain all the way to Lapland north of the Arctic Circle, and from Vienna in the center of Europe all the way to the Normandy beaches. Even today, over three decades later, despite all the subsequent traveling I've done, this trip remains the standard by which I have compared all the others.

This is a map of the routes traveled, taken from a trip log that I kept every day during the actual trip. The routes strongly reflect the regions where Eurailpasses were valid in those days. Nowadays the rail passes are of greater variety and cover more countries.

Day-by-day itinerary for the 45-day trip, again taken from my trip journal. This was not planned in advance; a lot of spur-of-the-moment decisions were made during the trip, resulting in the itinerary shown here.

St. Peter's Basilica in Rome (Vatican City).

This is a castle in Portugal which we saw on the train ride from San Martinho do Porto, traveling south toward Lisbon. 

This is the harbor of San Martinho do Porto, a beautiful resort town on the Portuguese coast a couple of hours north of Lisbon, where we spent two days.

This is a castle in southern Spain that we saw from the train, as it was traveling east of Seville on the way to Valencia and Barcelona.

View from the top level of the Eiffel Tower, with the Arc de Triomphe visible at the top of the photo.

Downtown Lisbon, Portugal

Members of my family backpacking through Zurich, Switzerland.

Alpine scenery in Switzerland visible from the train, going from Zurich to Milan (Italy).

Members of my family backpacking through a park in Luxembourg near our hotel.

Helsinki Cathedral, a Finnish Evangelical Lutheran cathedral, and a major landmark of the city.

Members of my family resting on benches outside the Narvik, Norway train station during a layover. The clock at right reads quarter to 3, and this refers to the early morning. This was early July, and in the "Land of the Midnight Sun", there is no darkness (Narvik is at about 68.4 degrees north latitude).

American military cemetery in Luxembourg, where casulaties from the Battle of the Bulge in World War II are buried. Obviously a very sad place.

View of Munich, Germany, showing many colorful buildings.

The Mont St. Michel island monastery in Normandy, France. Seeing this was one of the trip highlights, which is definitely saying something.

Great Britain - June 1990 and September 1991

In the early 1990s I made two trips to Great Britain. The June 1990 trip was made with family-of-origin (parents and two of my siblings). The trip was two weeks long, and involved a rental car with extensive driving through just about every corner of the country, from Devon in the southwest to Inverness in the northern reaches of Scotland. In addition to England, Scotland and Wales, the trip also included three days in Ireland; this involved a ferry ride from Fishguard (Wales) to Rosslare Harbor (Ireland) and then yet another rental car. In addition, we climbed Ben Nevis, which is located in Scotland and is Britain's highest mountain.  The 1991 trip was one week long and focused mainly on the south. It included London, Oxford, Exeter, Salisbury, St. Ives, and Bath.


Canterbury Cathedral.

Scenery in Exmoor National Park in the southwest.

Beautiful ocean and patchwork-quilt countryside in the southwest of England.











The famed White Cliffs of Dover.

Sign at the beginning of the trail for Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain.

View of trail going up Croagh Patrick, a famous mountain near Westport, Ireland, with some expansive Emerald Isle scenery in the background.

Atlantic Ocean waves crashing against rocks near St. Ives, England.

Charming main street of St. Ives in Cornwall, England.

Stained glass windows of Exeter Cathedral, Exeter, England.

Train stop for Moreton-in-Marsh, a town in the Cotswolds region of England.