Good news everyone! I got accepted to grad school, so I won’t be a hobo forever. The only problem is that it put a hitch in my plan to spend a year in Australia on a working holiday visa. With just a few months until the start of the school year, I decided to backpack around as much of the country/continent of Australia as I could and visit my Aussie Camino friends along the way.
A couple months before I was originally going to depart, my back suddenly seized up. It turned out that I had a bone spur on my L5 vertebrae that fractured off. That not only hurt like you wouldn’t believe, it put off my trip by about a month while I hobbled with a walker and did physical therapy at home.
And that’s how my backpack turned into a small carry-on suitcase which went with me everywhere from the Great Barrier Reef to the Outback. And that little sucker held up, mostly because, unlike Europe, Australia is mostly flat and has smooth sidewalks everywhere. Ok, maybe not everywhere. There may have been one incident where I dragged my suitcase across a patch of sandy desert like a madwoman trying to catch the only bus for a hundred miles.
In my telling of what ended up being a three month adventure, I won’t torture everyone with day by day synopses like I did for the Camino de Santiago. That made sense for the story of a pilgrim walking from town to town washing her socks and underwear in the sink, but on this trip I was a tourist riding the bus from town to town washing my socks and underwear in the washing machine. Instead, I’m going to break up my posts by region and share the highlights of what I saw, did, and learned.
Armed with my little carry-on and a Greyhound bus pass, I departed California on a Thursday in late May, 2026, lost Friday over the International Date Line, and arrived in Australia on Saturday. My journey began in Melbourne in the state of Victoria. What a nice name for a state.
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