Helium_Teapot's VirtualTourist Home Page

June will see Stephen and I take a weekend trip to Melbourne to take in some music (Low) at The Corner Hotel and warm up our credit card shopping on Brunswick St and in St Kilda (Hooray for #96 tram).

Then in July we're headed back to the USA, with a stop-over in Sydney for the night and a few hours in Korea (ICN). We're traveling with my Dad, brother and sister.We're all getting sick of waiting for time to pass before the big trip though I'm sure once it's underway we'll just be wanting to get off the epic Korean Airlines flight to New York. Once we arrive at JFK we have a quick commute across Queens to LGA where we'll take a late night flight to Norfolk, Virginia, jump in a hire car and drive 2 hours south to the Outer Banks. What a crazy 36 hours that'll be!

The reason for this epic adventure is a family reunion with my Dad's clan. For 2 weeks there will be between 14-28 loud southern family members to play with. After that we get a bit of culture back in our lives and get to fulfill our wish of returning to NEW YORK!!!

I currently live 5km east of Adelaide (South Australia) with my partner Stephen. I work as a graphic designer and university lecturer, Stephen works as an emergency nurse and runs a small indie record label.

We both have a strong interest in Australian and Adelaide live music; and have volunteered and presented radio show at Three D radio (threedradio.com), an independent music community radio station. We are currently taking a break from hosting radio (so as not to kill each other) but are blogging at stubbornlikeamule.net . We are also food junkies and have both gained too much food since we started cooking for each other.

As a kid I lived in Belgium with parents with serious travel bugs, which they have definately passed on to me.

I remember at age 5 going backpacking through Greece (my folks didn't have reservations or anything!). I had a fantastic time. Other times we visited Italy; where my 3 year old sister pushed me in her push chair around the cobled streets of Florence (me, lazy? Never!), and I remeber visiting the Loire Valley and being my parents personal tour guide through the chateaus.

As well as travelling around Europe I have visited my Dad's family in the US several times. We normally meet up in Hawaii or the Outer Banks. It's always a blast hanging out with them and drinking daquiris.

In 1988 we moved to Australia and initially stayed in an apartment overlooking Sydney harbour. This was during Australias bicentinary and we got to watch all the tall ships sailing in.

1992 saw the family move to Adelaide and since then we have been back to the state a few times.

In January 2004 my Dad, brother and sister and myself met up with my energetic 80 year old grandmother and did a 2 week North- South dash of New Zealand. It was beautiful, but we felt like we saw more of the inside of our 8 seater van than anything else. A lot of our accomidation was outside of city centres which meant the 3 of us 'kids' couldn't really head of and explore the nightlife. By the last few days we were thanking dad for the trip but all ready to go home!

In July 2005 we did a whirlwind 'round the world' trip; this will be Stephen's first oversea trip.

We visited New York, London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Milan and Hong Kong in our journeys and coincidentally took in 2 independance day celebrations (4th July and Bastille Day). All this 28 days! It was exhausting but we're already read to do it all again.

Of all the places we visited New York City calls us back the strongest. While Stephen is always asking if we can make a quick dash back to Hong Kong for some crazy gadget shopping.