kevin murphy

I may be a bit hard to reach for the next three weeks.  My beloved Jane and I will be touring Australia And New Zealand as a gift to each other for our twentieth wedding anniversary. Australia's a country I grew to love in a very short time.  Here's a country that has had as many troubles, as many challenges, as many heroes as my own, but they seem to have figured out what they are in the present moment with a grace and canny spirit that reminds me of the country I grew up in, good, bad and otherwise.  

By the way, their health system works pretty damned well.

I'll be visiting New Zealand for the first time, but I'm terribly excited after having had my introduction to the Maori people on the island of Rarotonga.  See, traveling for me has a way of stretching my mind and my will, my perceptions of how good or bad my own life is, and it builds in me the sort of planetary patriotism that inhabits my favorite travelers, from Darwin to Ben Franklin to Mark Twain to Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux.  Life is too short, or perhaps too long, and the world is to small, or perhaps too big, to harbor a provincial conceit that passes as love of country.  Don't doubt that I love my country, but I also love that it's a big, wild, amazing world out there if one is willing to leave the home block and look around.  

So I'll report back when I return.  I think I'll be disengaging from the online world for the duration of the trip, looking out, rather than looking in.  But Jane has her cameras and I my notebook, and we'll be landing with a hearty appetite.

Cheers.

-kwm

So