Jurien Bay to Perth

21/8/2015

Guest during my dinner yesterday

Rainy and stormy day almost all the way down to Perth, so I didn't stop at the Pinnacles. There is a little village called 'Seabird' which sign I've seen many times when driving up and down this road and this time I took the 10km detour to checked it out. They have a little cafe/restaurant/general store/bottleshop/all-in-one and I had a coffee there and spoke to the two women that were working there. Very quiet place and the rain outside and the fact that it is cold and winter didn't draw any people in while I was there.

A white inland sand dune

 

On the way into town I bought several bottles of wine and champagne for the next few days, I'll be couch surfing for a while and it is always nice to bring something along. I went to Austin Computers to get the SSDs in the laptop checked, but they had trouble opening the frame and gave me the address to an ASUS service center in Morley. I'll visit them on Monday as it is close to Alex's house. The solid state drive is getting worse, almost every second photo and every piece of music that I have on it is corrupted or severely damaged. Luckily I backed everything up on external harddrives, but I'll have to sort out, delete the unnecessary and crop all the photos where I'm not happy with the framing. Again! A work for the next few weeks, but I'd really like to get the computer working properly before I start that as it is much quicker from the SSD than from an external drive.

I watched the sunset a bit north of Freo – almost freezing due to the cold and wet weather down here. I was the only one wearing thongs – something I need to change soon, or risk frost bite on my toes ;-)

Anyway, in order to close the loop, I visited Lu in Mosman Park and had a wonderful champagne dinner to celebrate the safe return from an amazing journey. We indulged in a multi hour dinner and had many hours of fantastic conversation. We've both made many interesting experiences and realizations since the evening in February at the start of this trip and laughed a lot all evening long. Its shocking how quickly time goes by when in a good conversation and before I realized it, the clock has gone far past midnight and we called it a night. Lu is extremely dedicated to bring her PhD to a close, and hence got up at 7am already to go to the lab – on a Saturday morning. Science is a hard and brutal master.

I've concluded over the last week or so that this journey has indeed brought my life and thinking to a next level. I'm curious how the integration into my next adventure will work. I've got a meeting with our human resource manager on the 31^st August, so that will bring another chapter to a conclusion.

In the meanwhile I've got a lot to do and there are many people I want to catch up with in Perth.

Distance traveled: 260km

Travel times chart for Western Australia: Driving from Kununurra to Esperance for example takes at least 42.15 hours. I've been to both places ;-)

Now to a few statistics:

I've driven 19,326km in the van, since I left Perth in mid February. I've visited all states, except Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory – and as such pretty much circumnavigated a continent.

Most of the time while driving, in total several hundred hours, I had the pleasure to listen to interesting, smart, intelligent people discussing a very broad spectrum of topics. Special thanks to the great work of ChristopherRyan, Dave Asprey, Jordan Harbinger and Daniel Vitalis and all their guests and friends on their podcasts. I consider this a significant step in my education as a human being.

I've read 18 books on this trip

I wrote close to 50,000 words, published more than 1200 photos in the 76 blog posts and had more than 2350 page views in total. Kudos to all the readers.

I've taken 215 GB of photos (thanks to those huge RAW files!)

I've ticked off 5 items on my bucket list and have two more that are nearing completion

And above all: I've had an awesome time!