Completing the plan

I don’t know about mice and men, but my best laid plans started quite quickly to go ‘aft aglae’. As I began to research airlines and flights, it became more and more bewildering. Did I go on Emirates, straight from Newcastle to Dubai, but then wait all night for six hours for a connection? Or did I go via Heathrow, or Schiphol? What was best? Could I fit in a side trip on the way to Delhi and go out to Agra to see the Taj Mahal? And which way did I come home: via San Francisco where one of my nephews is currently living, or via Bolivia where there are a whole lot more Quakers – or straight home for a long sleep?

My solution was to get a brochure and with it, a travel agent. Nancy at Freedom Australia proved to know all kinds of useful stuff, including the way to get cheaper internal travel by doing the long haul on QANTAS. As Australia’s premier airline has a superb safety record, and the price didn’t seem very different from what I’d been finding, this seemed like a good idea.

So I took a map of Australia, and began to plan a route. Nancy’s helpful brochure indicated that Perth, my original starting point, had a temperature on average of 32 degrees in February, so I thought I’d start further south – that is, nearer the Pole! – and go to Adelaide. With my trusty 2010 diary, I worked out I could go round the South-East corner of this huge continent and visit a different Quaker Meeting each Sunday for five weeks.

Australian Quakers publish an invaluable handbook (with a lovely cartoon on the front) called the Australian Directory for Travelling Friends, with details of places for travelling Quakers to stay, and through this I found I could also have short midweek stays in Geelong (between Adelaide and Melbourne) and Newcastle (between Sydney and Brisbane). I’d wanted to go to Newcastle anyway, since I come from Newcastle, England: apparently it has suburbs with the same names as my Newcastle! So now I had a detailed itinerary, starting with Adelaide and going via Geelong, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Newcastle to Brisbane. By now I’d got firm dates for the planned New Zealand (or should I say Aotearoa?) holiday with my sister, so I could put dates on all these places. The next step was to email potential hosts and/or Meeting Houses: soon I had most of where I was going to stay sorted, and some useful contacts with the people who run the various Meetings: and some requests for meetings, talks or workshops. The response from Australian Quakers to my rather tentative offer of leading such things was very positive, and made me feel both nervous and excited. I’ve been a teacher of adults for much of my life, and a Quaker for almost all my adult life, so I did think I might have something worth sharing: and it looks as if there is going to be quite a bit of that. It’s something that is important to me, to share what I’ve learned and what I believe, and to learn from others: every good teacher will tell you that teaching is a learning experience!

So with a few hiccups and lurches, the plan was in place. I’d been thinking of rail travel for some journeys (see my other Blog, ‘A Greenish Woman’s diary’) but the distances and travel times, not the mention the cost, in the end looked prohibitive. So apart from the first internal journey, from Adelaide to Geelong, and the two short journeys from Geelong to Melbourne and from Sydney to Newcastle, it’s fly fly fly all the way. So that’s all booked. All I have to do now is confirm arrangements with various hosts, sort out staying in Sydney Meeting House, and keep myself fit and well for the next two weeks. I’ve not done too well on this last, having fallen off my bicycle last Monday, with consequences that have only just become apparent and which include finding my left knee in a lot of pain and unable to function properly. Silly me: I should have realised I was trying to cycle on ice! But hopefully it will all be at least well on the mend by Tuesday fortnight, and I’ll be ready for the off.

Planning the adventure

I've always wanted to go to the opera in Sydney. I remember all the fuss when Jørn Utzon won the competition with some rather rough sketches, which proved impossible actually to build, but from which was developed the iconic building we know today. Being a great lover of opera, it’s not surprising that visiting Sydney and going to the opera there became one of my lifetime ambitions.

Various responsibilities made it impossible to go for some time. But when my Dad died last year, two years after my Mum, it became feasible: I now had the money and didn’t have the responsibilities. I began to plan for a holiday in 2010. But whilst planning, it occurred to me that I might also do what Quakers call ‘travelling in the Ministry’, visiting among Quakers in Australia. I should explain that I’ve been a Quaker for nearly 50 years and am still very active in Quaker affairs, so I’ve some experience to bring which I thought Australian Friends (the official name of Quakers is ‘the Religious Society of Friends’) might find interesting. I tested this idea in the way Quakers have, and was encouraged and supported to go ahead.

As I began to pencil in dates and times and cities, I discovered that my sister was also planning to go to Australia and New Zealand at a similar time. Now I don’t know anyone in Australia, but I do know two or three people in New Zealand and I’d wondered about taking a tour of the country whilst I was in that part of the world. So after some negotiation, my sister drew up a plan for a three week tour of both of the main NZ islands, going from south to north, and we settled on dates.

So here was now the outline of a plan: to visit Friends in Australia, join up with my sister to have a holiday in New Zealand, and then complete a round the world tour, possibly by calling on cousins in Canada or my nephew in San Francisco: or even, at one point, on the Quaker community in Bolivia (not by any means off the route from New Zealand to the UK).

And I decided to try to write a blog, to record on a daily basis what I did, who I met and what I saw when on my trip, from leaving my house until I arrived back home two or three months later. This, written in December, is the first entry: next time I’ll record how the plan developed and then how the preparations go. I hope it will all be of interest.