gone living

after trying on a variety of silly hats here in adelaide (photos coming soon), we settled on a couple of akubra hats to keep the sun out of our eyes while hiking in the outback. we picked up our 4wd toyota land cruiser yesterday complete with power fridge and rooftent (see the picture if you aren't familiar with the rooftent concept. it's not something you often see in the United States) from our excellent rental folks, and are now fully loaded with supplies and ready to head up north into the flinders ranges, entering the australian outback for the first time. our 1-way drive from adelaide to darwin will take us over 2,700 kilometers right through the middle of australia. (that's 1,670 miles for all the good folks not using the metric system)

our plan is to spend a leisurely three weeks heading north across australia on the stuart highway, with extensive detours at australia's national parks along the way. then we return the car in darwin, where i hop on a flight 1-way flight up to brunei to begin the southeast asia portion of the trip.

thanks to the wonderful weird circumstances of this trip, i'll be picking up my dive mask (fitted with prescription lenses) at the post office in coober pedy, which is about as far from any diving as you can get. i'll explain the circumstances of this one another time, and leave figuring out why i'm doing this as an exercise to the reader.