It's interesting that the time elapsed between our arrival back in Hobart (on the 12th of January I think it was) and somewhere around the 22nd of Feb when we were settled in "the flat" with the fire and the television going - about 6 weeks - was what it took to get our land-legs.

The comforts of a hot shower, a stocked refrigerator, a double bed, a woodstove, a DVD player - plus floor and walls that didn't rock and roll - was what drew Adrienne and me across the watery gap and onto the land. Contrast this with what I wrote in my notes, intended for the blog, a month ago:


We are back "at sea", on a mooring at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania and the sea breeze has been belting in for hours now and the boat's movement is lively. To board our supplies was heroic.

Australia is a foreign country. Although we have been loaned a car and have shopped for seedless grapes, tomatoes, spotty bananas and rat poison not to mention beer and wine (I told you not to mention beer and wine!) we are still living our nomadic life - our seafaring life - aboard.

We bought a computer keyboard because our laptop will not type an "L". We visited our old house, and although my eyes reported everything was the same, everything is DIFFERENT!

The tectonic plates of the sub-ocean have shifted and IT IS ALL DIFFERENT. The two and a half years away have cracked something in the brain - and is not that why we travel? Agree/disagree? - doesn't matter, but in coming back here I have come back to a different place, still called Hobart and see people the moment after we left, there being no gap at all. Yet their inch is not my inch, their metre not mine either.

How strange! How wonderful! How A.I.W.!!*

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So, sitting at my desk by the window looking out at the bush I am comfortable, maybe for the first time in years. But I don't want to entirely lose that difference, don't want to get subsumed by the land-life. The shift has happened, but I still walk with the sailor's roll!

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Photo, since I got my camera back, shows our one-room flat - quite cosy if you don't mind walking through the rain to the bathroom.

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* Alice In Wonderland