I am reposting this from a warm and humid Nova Scotia, but it is wintry in Melbourne. It is too bad I didn’t insert the pics into the text when i wrote this. Check out “Great Ocean Road” on the Flickr site to get a sense of what this spectacular route looks like.

Down Under

I have not yet managed to pinpoint the problem, but Noel and Australia just don’t go together. It won’t be the first place I’ve lived sans snow or ice during the festive period of Christmas, but the holiday marketing here is completely at odds with my Christmas sensibility. There were recent newspaper articles about summer reading and topless sunbathing. How does that get you in the mood for Christmas? What next, Christmas pudding at the beach? Yuletide barbies?

Fortunately, the arrival of two friends from Florida bounced me out of my grinch-like mood. They have been planning their trip for quite some time, and part of their whirlwind tour of Sydney, Tasmania, New Zealand and Melbourne involved me. They wanted to take in the Great Ocean Road. For me, it was an opportunity to revisit a spectacularly beautiful area that had I had seen once before, on our first trip…

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