Hi Kyrill,
Let me give you a tiny vignette of life on the road with family in Australia........
I took my two daughters, Soraya 22 and Alessandra 19, to visit their Grandmother. They are on University vacation.
I must say that travelling in a small metal enclosure for five hours each way with two siblings is an exquisite form of torture, gender specific, of course......
The point scoring and general frisson in the atmosphere is, well, troubling over a long period......
Hope you had a nice trip and that you found your mother in good health
The trip was wonderful, around 10 litres/100kms, very comfortable, warm, but overcast, grey weather, often raining. My Mother at almost eighty is not in good health; she suffers heart disease, dreadful, immobilising arthritis, and mild diabetes. We all ate too much good food, and I've just returned from a restoring jog around the park which has left me feeling much better. I saw my brother Patrick and his wife and two girls and that's always wonderful - he is a senior employee of our largest telecoms company - an industry he is thoroughly sick of these days.
and had good meals, good beer, singing in the rainsunshine and have seen beautiful birds and reindeer and other AU winter coming animals
Sadly, I hardly drink these days, not even wine, it really knocks me round! And not much in the way of birds, I'm afraid, lots of crows, sparrows, and other colourless animals, and definitely no reindeer, but lots of cattle and sheep, though all nicely contained within fields with big fences. Australia is an old land, a tired looking country at present particularly after drought, and our recent rains have merely left a veneer of green over the land but nothing yet of any real substance. The farms are in a bad state, and many farmers are on the verge of bankruptcy, particularly inland a few more kilometres where rains have been non-existent for almost five years in some areas. Many have now been sold for pine and sugar gum plantations which supply hungry laser printers around the world. The SE of SA and western districts of Victoria are generating 5000 tonnes a day of wood chip exports, nearly all to Japan. Climate change has even affected the southernmost lands of the world, and while I'm not so alarmist as many I do agree with Al Gore that our atmosphere is impossibly thin compared to the size of the earth and we really should look after it rather better than we do!
Cheers,
Hugh
