In January 2017 my husband Eric Sponberg and I departed St. Augustine, FL, on our 35-foot sailboat Corroboree with the goal of sailing around the world. I have no idea whether we will make it. As with any journey, the path is never as straight as you optimistically plan. But you go anyway, in hopes of a great adventure and because you can’t ignore the tug in your heart that beckons you on.
This blog will be the story of our voyage…and much more.
Back in January I wrote a blog post about the Australia bushfires to assure our friends and family we were safe and to give my perspective, as a temporary resident, on the disastrous situation. Two months later, with the entire world in turmoil from COVID-19, you surely don’t need me to report on a calamity […]
When it rains, it pours. In Australia, in late January, that phrase began to ring all too true. After months of blistering drought and nightmare bushfires, the wet stuff arrived. Sometimes it draped everything in a soggy mist that would make you swear you were in Ireland. Other days it dialed up and down, hours […]
We arrived in Adelaide on 5 November and what a delightful city it is! Of course, I am prejudiced. This is because when the city was laid out in 1837, the planners incorporated a goal to ring the city with parks. Not as an afterthought, “Oh, let’s save a bit of grass here and there.” […]
We reached Melbourne on 29 October, and I’m sorry to say our first impression of Australia’s second largest city, population 4.8 million, was not favorable. It’s not that we automatically dislike big cities. We loved Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra, and for our stay in Melbourne we had booked a centrally located motel so we had […]
This isn’t the blog I planned to post today. Just back from a fabulous two-week holiday with our kids in Sydney and Tasmania, I planned to continue the saga of the Great Australian Road Trip Eric and I undertook to Adelaide in October/November. I’ll resume that story in due course. But with Australia’s catastrophic bushfires […]
If you were to list the top ten iconic structures in the world, I’m pretty sure the Sydney Opera House would rank right up there with the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu and the Taj Mahal. So when we arrived in Sydney on 15 October, the first thing we did after checking […]
We’re back! After 7 weeks on the road in Glinda, 9,000 km (5,400 miles) on the odometer, in wind, rain, sun, dust and bush fires, traversing mountains, seacoasts, big cities and small towns, sighting koalas, kookaburras and other cool Aussie critters, meeting people, having conversations and making, however briefly, connections, Eric and I are home […]
I am not a good cook. Never have been, never will be, never aspired to be. Nevertheless, I do try, from time to time, to augment my meager culinary skills, and this has sometimes resulted in one or two reasonably palatable dishes being added to my repertoire. So when I come across a discarded magazine […]
Sailing into Brisbane two months ago, Eric and I were appalled to see a blanket of brownish-orange smog draped over the city. Having encountered only clear blue skies elsewhere in Oz, we felt almost betrayed. Surely, Australians cared more about their environment than to allow such pollution to occur? You would have thought we were […]
A while ago, I came across the following definition of cruising in a boating magazine: Cruiser: Someone who sails for pleasure without an exact destination, and in some cases without an exact duration. By that measure, Eric and I are not entirely cruisers. For one thing, we always have an exact destination for which we […]