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.