Is this time TRAVEL? No, it is travel TIME. Owing to our long flight across the international date line, we never experience the second calendar day of our trip.

What I am trying to explain is this: When our plane flight takes off from Los Angeles, it’s Day 1 on the calendar in the U.S.A., and when we land it is Day 3 on the calendar in Australia.

For us, it’s just a matter of adopting the Aussie calendar, of course. For you, thinking about our time there, my best suggestion is to think of the time in the eastern U.S., then add 14 hours.  If that calculation crosses over the stroke of midnight, then we will be a day ahead of you on the calendar. We’ll let you know what “the future” is like since we will see it first! 🙂

One aspect of the Australian calendar is that it is reversed from that of the northern hemisphere. Thus, our April trip is the onset of fall for Aussies, versus the onset of spring. Our hurricane season won’t begin until June, while their hurricane or “cyclone” season is coming to a close at the end of April. Why bring that up? Good news, bad news, and below is “breaking news” happening just prior to our air travel in the area north of our second stop, Cairns and Port Douglas.

What are those distances? Our first stop is climatically a world away. To the denizens of Melbourne, this cyclone is the equivalent of living in Nova Scotia, Canada, when a hurricane makes landfall in Miami, FL. On the map is our second stop a week from now in Cairns, from which the Cooktown landfall of Cyclone Ita is a mere 170 kilometers to the north, a little over 100 miles, about the distance between Myrtle Beach, SC, and Charleston, SC.

Thus you gather that Australia is a taller country / continent / island than the continental U.S.A. It is not quite as wide, with the distance east-to-west being about the length of New York City to Las Vegas, not Los Angeles.

For this experience we’re missing a couple weeks of Spring stateside. That’s a pretty time of year in NC, but it comes with some natural hazards also, as we’re in pollen season, where clouds of yellow-green dusty particulates drift through the air onto everything, and into your lungs, creating its own kind of natural disaster. The contrast of the pollen with the beauty of azaleas and dogwoods is striking: