Well, our 8-month, 50,000k road tour of Australia has finally ended! The feeling is a bitter sweet one. We left Sydney on July 30th for Los Angeles and have been unpacking and shifting gears for the many new projects that lie ahead.

You'll be happy to know that the 'broken' Landy made a safe journey by container ship from Perth to South Africa where it is now in the capable hands of our Land Rover friends in Johannesburg.

What next?! At some point we will begin work on a book about our Australian adventures. We brought back 30,000 slides from the eight months in Australia so you can imagine the process (and the work!) involved in reviewing and cataloguing these images. Some images will be reserved for the book project, others will go to stock agencies and to various magazine concerns around the world.

Meanwhile, Dr. Duplaix hit the ground running - after just a few days in Williamsburg where she unpacked and then repacked her trusty Eagle Creek bags she left for Paris, France to holiday with family and friends. From there she heads to Suriname, South America with the Oceanic Society to evaluate some future projects concerning the Giant river otter. She did her seminal research on otters there 20-some years ago which led to her first magazine article for National Geographic.

I am busy upgrading my Mac desktop and primary software collections, and am enjoying a new Epson Photo printer. It handles the D1's digital images wonderfully well and it produces portfolio quality output from scans. This is all great fun for me after so many months of basic laptop traveling in the internet-compromised Outback.

On a sadder note, I lost two important people during my recent travels abroad. My eldest brother and best friend, Philip, died just as I was winging my way to Australia last August. Then my dear friend, Madaline, who was 96 years old and cyber-savy, died just two weeks ago, hours after my arrival back in the states. She and I were long-time friends and we had been in daily email contact for years. She died before I could get to Minnesota to see her. Such losses, those two! But I left behind many friends in Australia who bring a whole new dimension to my life so life is good. Thank God for FRIENDS! I have many of them, everywhere...

I want to end with a quote from the National Geographic book, AUSTRALIA - Journey Through a Timeless land: "The most remote of the inhabitated continents, Australia is a fabulous paradox, at once a youthful nation of brash vitality and the home of the planet's oldest continuous culture, a vast, awe-inspiring landscape that slumbered in the Aboriginal Dreamtime for 60,000 years. It boasts some of the lushest country in the world, and some of the most forbidding, along wiwth a unique flora and fauna that evolved over millennia of splendid isolation. The natives call it OZ, and it is in truth a magical, fantastic land."

Indeed it is. I am definitely going to be leaving a part of me Down Under.