In the process of migrating hosting companies, and did not realize that “backing up the database” and “exporting posts” were not the same thing.   Bleh…   I should be back up in the next day or so.

UPDATE:  Well, it wasn’t a day - it was about an hour.   But I managed to make a mess of the nameservers caching, so it’ll probably take the rest of the day to get it all straightened out from around the world.  Even at my house, my desktop shows the new host, my netbook shows the old host.

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This week went by so fast… I never got a chance to do anything at home.  Today, I downloaded the new update to WordPress, and a new presentation theme that I believe will be more appropriate for visitors now that the trip is completed.  So if something looks funny over the next week, it is probably because I’m fiddling with the theme layout.

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I certainly did not take a complete break from the internet while I was in Australia. For one thing, I wrote over 50 entries in this blog. I used Skype to call home on days where I had purchased in-room internet access, I checked my personal email, I bought airplane tickets online, I used a few internet cafes to cut costs. But I did pull away from general work e-mail successfully for three weeks. And for you Type A personalities out there (and goodness knows I’m not one of them) the world did not end while I was gone.

For those of you who feel that you cannot pull away for three weeks, try these steps on a simple one-week vacation.

1. Get yourself a temporary and disposable email address. Gmail works fine and is actually preferable if you’re going to use a lot of internet cafes. Delete the address when you get back so that any email accidentally sent to that address in the future bounces. [Since I have my own email domain, I was able to create a unique email and forward it to my home email while I was on vacation, and to my work mail when I got back.]
2. Set your work email autoresponder to explain that you are gone and who should be contacted. If your email server has a rules-base, you can write rules to automatically forward certain emails to certain people (I did not do that);
3. Give your full itinerary including hotel phone/fax numbers to one or two trusted people with instructions to call you if there’s an absolute meltdown;
4. Give a broader set of colleagues the emergency email address and let them know that it’s fine to send you email to that address (as blind copy, using your work email as the regular recipient) if there’s an issue where it’s not obvious what your reaction would be and where they think you need to be involved. Let people know it’ll probably take 48 hours for you to get back to them; and
5. Allow yourself to check the emergency email address almost every day. Quickly deal with whatever comes in, and get on with your vacation.

Of course, if you’re self-employed, this may not work (but see below). But I find that this approach relaxes me on two fronts:

• It keeps my mind from distracted by items my colleagues know both how to handle themselves and how I’d handle them if I was in the office; and
• It keeps my mind settled that the house is not burning down, because if it’s truly important, they’ll find me.

In three weeks, I received two email messages, one of which I specifically asked to be forwarded if it arrived. There was one other item which never arrived which I figured would, so I sent back a quick note asking about it, and got two brief responses. That was it. I don’t think I spent more than two hours on work on the entire trip, until the morning I flew back from Sydney, when I went online and downloaded my email so I could have something to do on the flight.

I had never been able to put my finger on why this combination of prohibiting most email but encouraging people to contact me is so effective. Then I read a blog post by Tim Ferriss, self-employed author of The Four Hour Work Week. Tim is a bit of an extremist, and went on a ten day “media fast.” In his post, he talks about “the art of letting bad things happen.” Tim writes: “It’s the worst of states, where you experience neither relaxation nor productivity. Be focused on work or focused on something else, never in-between.”

Your colleagues will not let anything truly “bad” happen - the worst that will happen is that something is not phrased or positioned exactly how you’d like it. You have the freedom to let go and enjoy your vacation supremely confident in them. But if they’re not sure what you’d do, they have the freedom of asking you and not feeling badly about it. I think it’s this shared freedom that it’s ok to “focus on something else,” and it’ll be ok when they go on vacation, that makes the process work.

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My new toy arrived yesterday. I bought an Amazon gift card from with all the loose change I’d collected in the fourth quarter of 2007, and used some of it to order Adobe Photoshop Elements on Sunday. For a few years, I was using a Corel package that came with the desktop before my current one, and did not realize that it was hacking the jpeg size (and therefore complexity) down to less than a quarter of the original. For the last year and a half, I’ve been using the free Picasa software, but it is rather rudimentary. The reviews of Photoshop Elements are mostly bi-polar - most people like it a lot, a few people despise it. The cost after rebate is $65, but I need to upgrade the quality of my photography results. Hosting too, but that’s a different post.

I do not think I will be able to play with Elements for another week, however; this weekend is completely booked solid and I leave on a business trip on Monday.

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I’ve been thinking about the issues surrounding the monopoly at Ayers Rock Resort, and how I’d do Uluru (photos) differently next time. Because the person I called at Ayers Rock Resort was great about changing my stay without penalty with one day’s notice due to my sinus infection, I really did not have much flexibility on how I would have changed things from my original two-night reservation.

But you’ll have flexibility - so here’s my plan:

1. Try not to go in the summer or winter. 102 degrees is hot, even in the desert. In the winter, it can get down to freezing, and sunrise is late enough that you cannot do a morning tour and catch a flight to most places. I don’t know this for sure, but I would think that April would be a great month to visit.
2. Fly to Ayers Rock from Melbourne, not the other way around. Right now, the nonstop flight leaves on Mondays and Fridays, so Monday is perfect because it lets you spend the weekend in Melbourne. If you go the other way, the flight is too early in the day to do anything before leaving.
3. Stay only one night. This is a big reason why I would rule out going in winter, because a sunrise tour is not going to work logistically. Plus it will be cold. If you get to the resort by 1pm, that still leaves you plenty of time to do the base walk in the afternoon.
4. Fly out of Ayers Rock to Sydney or Cairns, depending on your itinerary. This is important because you want to stay as late as possible so that you can do a morning tour such as the Desert Experience Tour, and depending on the season, you might not get back until 11:30am. If you want to go to Alice Springs, two of the major tour bus companies run buses from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs in the afternoons - the flight northbound is at around 10am.
5. Rent a car. If there are two of you, you are looking at A$70 for the round-trip shuttle bus that only operates once per hour. Renting a car gives you far more flexibility for touring, but the rental car companies do put a 100km/day limit on the cars so you don’t go off and drive up to Alice Springs or something. The drive is dead simple, just one two-lane highway and a little access road for the resort. The Aurion I rented in Hobart is A$75 from Hertz, after taxes but before insurance and a few liters of gas.
6. Spring for one of the mid-range hotels. I stayed in the el cheapo Outback Pioneer Lodge because I was there for two nights, and A$300 * 2 was a bit much. I don’t think I’d stay at the Sails in the Desert, but the Desert Gardens looked rather reasonable by comparison.

This approach gives you about 20 hours on site, which is more than enough. I think the Desert Awakenings Tour was worth the A$132 because you receive a lot of backstory about the area. If you’re on a budget, you can fashion an acceptable picnic dinner from the grocery or get fast food from the Pioneer to help offset the better hotel.

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I’ll start recapping with the negatives, as while they were few and generally more of annoyance than anything, they come to mind quickly:

• Australian Diet Coke tastes lousy.  Fortunately, I do not mind Coke Zero.
• I never got to try a chiko roll; whenever I found one at a store, it looked like it had been sitting under the heat lamp for about three days;
• The fact that so many of the sights in Melbourne are sprawled out away from the city, and not particularly accessible by public transportation.  Next time, I’m going to rent a car in Melbourne so I can go to the gold minds, the forest, the drive-through zoo, and the wineries.
• Having to pay A$35 to get from the Ayers Rock Resort to Uluru itself, and
• The flies.  They were not in Sydney, but they were everywhere else in neverending swarms.  They were just brutal, and had an affinity for trying to fly into my nostrils.

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I usually do not get jet lag very badly.  This time, however, it has been brutal: I’ve not been able to fall asleep until after 4AM each of the last three nights.   Tonight, I’ll settle for 1AM!

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A couple of weeks ago, I’m shopping for souvenirs at the Freycinet National Park gift shop.  I’m not buying much because my big suitcase is back in Melbourne and I’m extremely pressed for space in my small bag and backpack due to Virgin Blue’s weight limits.

I find a book that I really liked: a pictorial of Tasmania by an Australian travel publishing company called Steve Parish Publishing.  It’s on the expensive side, and it’s bulky.  So, I figure that since it’s a book and it’s probably overpriced in a gift shop, I’ll be able to find it in Sydney for the same price, or at least online from Amazon when I get home.

No such luck.  Zero for two in Sydney, and none of the US booksellers seem to carry it online.   I ended up ordering it this morning from one of the an Australian chains I visited (Dymocks).  It ended up costing me another A$20, as the book was $10 cheaper but the shipping via DHL was A$30.   Another bookseller had it for even cheaper because they were discounting it 10% and also willing to refund the general sales tax, but wanted A$49 for postal shipping.

Moral of the story: the global economy is not quite there yet…  if you see something you like while you’re on vacation, buy it!

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I’ve actually made it to page 2 for the generic search phrase “australian vacation” without any other qualifiers, and with hardly any links to the site from elsewhere.  I’ve been getting 4-5 random visitors per day from various search terms.   Welcome!

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Greetings from the Red Carpet Club at Los Angeles International Airport.   The flight home was about 90 minutes shorter, and it seemed to go by much faster.    The food was worse than usual, and I still can’t find a comfortable way to sleep fully reclined in United’s business class seats - compared to American’s where I’d been known to sleep an entire Chicago-London flight from the end of takeoff to breakfast.

I managed to get about four hours sleep, mostly in the last half of the flight.  It took about an hour to get through immigration, customs, and then back through security for the domestic flight.  My flight to Chicago leaves in 45 minutes, so I’m off to find some food before heading to the gate.

I’ll have a few more thoughts next week - “best of” lists, etc.  But it’s been a busy three weeks.  I’m happy that I took the trip, and I think that all in all it worked out very well.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading along.

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