A Journey of Travel

Recently, I reintroduced myself and the three things I love most in the world: Travel, Writing, and Circus.

In my next few posts, I’ll talk about each of these loves in more detail. How I started with them, what they mean to me and my life, the experience and lessons they have offered, and how each one entwines with the other two.

I’ll start with Travel.

I come from a middle-class family with a mix of white and blue-collar workers. Our childhood holidays were spent on the Gold or Sunshine Coasts. I took my first flight at the age of thirteen, a three-hour domestic journey from my hometown of Brisbane to Hobart, Tasmania.

When I was sixteen, my mum and stepfather took my sister and I on a two-week caravaning road trip from Brisbane to Melbourne along the east coast of Australia. We caught the Spirit of Tasmania ferry and settled in Hobart, where we lived for two months before my sister and I returned to Brisbane.

My next visit to Tasmania was to attend the Tasmanian Circus Festival and training week in Golconda, a forty-five minute drive northeast of Launceston in the rural Tamar Valley region. I had my driver’s licence by then, and hired a Wicked Van in Hobart. I drove up the middle of the Apple Isle, stopping in historical towns and sites of interest along the way, like Ross and Perth. I credit this trip with sparking my confidence as a solo traveller.

Just after my twenty-first birthday I spent a week in Broome, Northwestern Australia, where my mum and stepdad had been living and working for six months. It was a place where the desert meets the sea, the red dirt running into the bright blue Indian Ocean. So different from the subtropical East Coast. My fleeting visit was crammed with activity: I rode a camel on Cable Beach, took a sunset cruise on a pearling boat, rode on a hovercraft and stood in a dinosaur footprint at Gantheaume Point, and took a seaplane flight to the Horizontal Falls.

For my first trip overseas, I visited expat friends in Singapore, explored Paris for four days, and took a two–week group tour of Britain and Ireland. I returned to Ireland five years later on a three-week book research trip for a crime novel set in Galway.

Once I had my passport and started venturing overseas, I didn’t think I would travel much in Australia. I figured I would do that later in life when my body had tired of long-haul flights. That plan changed when the pandemic hit, and my exploration was limited to destinations closer to home. I made the most of the restrictions: In 2022, I travelled to Darwin for the NT Writers Festival, and hired another Wicked van for a four-day solo road trip through Kakadu National Park.

That same year, I made my first proper visit to Sydney. I had driven through the city before and had many stopovers between connecting flights to other places, but never stayed. I thoroughly enjoyed my weekend there: I explored Circular Quay and The Rocks, did the coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee, and stayed at The Mercantile, Australia’s oldest Irish pub. I then continued on to Katoomba to attend the Blue Mountains Writers Festival.

In 2024, I set out on my biggest adventure yet. I wanted to visit a Canadian friend I had made on the Britain and Ireland bus tour twelve years earlier. I spent seven weeks travelling around Canada, from East to West, in Vancouver, the Okanagan, Banff, One Hundred Mile House, Victoria, the Sunshine Coast, St. John’s in Newfoundland, and Toronto. I then returned to Ireland for the third time, for a year-long working holiday while I continued writing my crime novel. I have written a blog series about this experience called The Cold Plunge, and I am in the process of recording a podcast and writing a memoir about it too. Watch this space!

In my next post, I’ll take you on a different journey- my writing journey, a lifelong creative pursuit.