12 August

Before I start on anything else, I regret to say that the son of an ex-student and a friend passed away on Sunday 10 August. Mitchell Harrower died in the morning after protracted loss of function caused by his Neumann-Pick Type C disease. He had been on morphine and oxygen for a time and finally lost his fight to live. His funeral will be on Thursday afternoon.

I hope all details of my travel for the next section have been successfully concluded. I have to drop out to Passport Travel to get my passport with its visas and all my other travel documents on Friday, start packing (and checking and checking) and finish all my other arrangements. I will email out all the details to those of you on my mailing list before I leave. I have already got my small change to arrive in countries with, a new suitcase (the zip on my current one expired as I left the airport and I hoped that I didn't have to open anything as I wouldn't be able to close it again (I didn't) and just have to finalise things by the weekend.

One highlight (I hope) will be visiting Santa's factory. From here I will post cards to children and expect they will be received with lots of enthusiasm (and around Christmas, if I can arrange it).

I was able to drive over to Perth and catch up with relatives and friends there. It was great to be driving DOUG again and wonderful to effortlessly chew up the 2600 km between Adelaide and Perth in short shrift. Perhaps the best aspect was seeing so much water in WA with many watercourses running at full capacity (but they need to for a much longer time to restore anything like normaliity). Back home I picked up ARTIE after warranty work was completed on the gearbox (very hard to select first gear occasionally) and now have to run in the gearbox linkage again. I also have to re-register DOUG 2 before I leave as his falls due while I am away.

I still have no idea of Internet access while I am away, but will write each evening and process photos, then see how things are. Some of the places I am going to have the reputation of being either slow to adapt to technological change or have restricted access, so it's most likely that some periods will be blank and then there will be a rush when I can publish.

I'll post again over the weekend and give a progress report.