Half a month of madness in pictures

For my Christmas break last year, as you may recall, JVA and I took a massive road trip up the coast of Queensland, from Brisbane to the Great Barrier Reef. And then, over the next several weeks, I laboriously attempted to recap the trip over far too many posts on this blog.

For my Christmas break this year, as I previewed in my farewell to 2008, I set out on what was an even more ambitious itinerary, as I went from Sydney to Byron Bay, back to Sydney, up to MacMasters Beach for Christmas, back to Sydney, down to Wagga Wagga, further down to Melbourne, further down to Lorne and The Falls Festival, then back to Sydney along the coast of Victoria and New South Wales.

It was a wild, wild, wild trip, oh yes. And as with the cricket trip to Newcastle, it exceeded any and every expectation that I had for it.* Unlike the cricket trip to Newcastle, however, this was no little three-day weekend, oh no; this was 15 consecutive days of activity, of hootenanny, of hijinx, of hoolbool. In fact, it may have been the most exhilarating, entertaining, manic, jam-packed 15-day stretch of my life. No exaggeration. I've had unbelievable days in the past. I've had great weekends, such as that trip to Newcastle. I've had fantastic months. But on a pound-for-pound basis, for every single day over the past half a month, that trip was insane. INSANE.

*Joe Posnanski -- yes, the man crush is still alive and well -- has recently championed an approach to rating movies in which you base your rating (on a scale of 1 to 5) against your expected rating going into a movie. In lieu of simply rating a movie, I think this is a much more realistic way to gauge how we actually feel about a movie. For example, we all know that feeling when you go to a movie that everyone has been RAVING about and you leave thinking it was good but not great, that you've been let down. So in this case, let's say you were expecting a 5 movie but thought it was only a 4. That's a minus-1 movie to Posnanski. A good movie, yes, but you still feel disappointed. Conversely, if you go into a movie that you've heard nothing about and expect maybe a 3, but leave thinking that that movie was also a 4, well, that's a plus-1 movie to Posnanski. So they're both 4 movies, but you leave the second with a much better feeling than the first.

Anyway. Let's carry this system over to this trip. I expected a 4. That's solid, right? Well, I got a 5. Easily. I sleepwalked to that 5. A 5 hardly does it justice. So let's call this trip a plus-1+. Because unlike the amplifier in This is Spinal Tap, this scale has no leeway to go one notch higher to a 6.

Now the question is, how can I possibly capture this trip with words? And after dedicating several thousand words and five posts to last year’s trip to the Great Barrier Reef, I realize I can't. It was hard enough to do justice to that trip with words; to even try to do the same with this one would be a joke. So Im not going to go down that road. Instead, here’s a bit of a photo/video essay of the trip, with some notes interspersed throughout.

Byron Bay

MacMasters Beach

Lost in the serenity of this beautiful locale, I forgot to take any pictures over my two days there. So instead, you'll just have to picture me on your typical Christmas Day. You know, waking up and taking a dip in the ocean, eating lunch and dinner on a patio overlooking the beach, having some plum pudding for dessert, and drinking plenty of Pimms and lemonade. (It's for moments like these that I love being here.)

Sydney to Melbourne

Melbourne

The Falls Festival

A few quick notes here:

• It was unseasonably cold. Very cold. As low as 5°C (41°F). And off and on rain the whole time. A good camping experience this does not make.
• The musical highlights for me, by far, were Architecture in Helsinki and The Cat Empire. Santogold and Donavon Frankenreiter also did not disappoint.
• It was universally agreed that the lead singer of The Hives is a douche. There was also some debate as to whether he learned his English from Terrance and Phillip.
• New Year's Eve was not in any way a focal point of the festival. And considering how catastrophically awful my last few New Year's have been, I couldn't have been more pleased. On the night of the 31st, there was music, then we counted down to midnight, then Franz Ferdinand came on. C'est tout.

Back to Sydney

Yes, it was a good trip. And I hope these photos and video give a sense of that.

And now we can offically close the book on 2008 and look ahead to a new year that will bring... well, I have no idea. Let's discuss next time.