Greetings from Sydney!

I am safely ensconced Down Under after what turned out to be a remarkably pleasant trans-Pacific flight. I left Thursday evening (after some mushy kissy exchanges with Jan at the airport), flew to San Francisco, and then on to Sydney. It’s 14 hours, so I brought The Lord of the Rings and my laptop to beguile the time. But to my astonishment, I was actually able to sleep two four hour shifts, so I got off the plane (“pline” as they say here) and met Peter H, who squired me off to my accomodations. Once settled, I got some work done on the laptop and then went off to Peter’s house for dinner with his wonderful family. Mrs. H is a great cook and their kids are adorable, so that was fun. Peter told me about his Excellent American Adventure a few years back, when he toured the States and had sundry Dickensian encounters with Genuine American Characters like The Two Huge Black Guys With Gold Teeth who took turns hitting on the TSA chick at LAX and then, because they took a shine to him, decided to bodyguard him all the way to his gate with his puny frame squoze between these two massive guys. When he got to the gate, everybody was staring at him and wondering who this important guy must be with the impressive posse. He also got a) grilled by Abp. Chaput; b) a chance to visit Steubenville and yak with Scott Hahn while he was busy grading paper, c) a visit to DC and d) a visit to EWTN where he taped a Journey Home with Marcus Grodi (you can probably find the show in the EWTN archives on line. Then back to Sydney.

It was a hilarious evening listening to his Marco Polo stories of an Aussie view of life in the US and we yukked it up till quite late. On the way home, we stopped at a “servo” (gas station/convenience store for you Yanks) and I grabbed a couple of things. As they rang us up, one of the punks who had been loitering outside came in, grabbed a bunch of stuff of the shelves, and bolted for the door! I become an eyewitness to a robbery! He was gone like a flash of course, but it was still pretty weird. The clerk was sullenly resigned about it. Not the first time it’s happened, I reckon.

I slept like a rock last night and then we went to Mass this morning. The visiting priest was a sweet old guy who just could not contain his mushiness for the congregation and kept calling out all the beautiful children and the wonder families and everybody was just so great. It was very cute. One of the guys he picked out was a Palestinian man who was in the front row because his son was serving. Turns out the guy was born in the house next door to the Church of the Nativity. So that was pretty cool. The house is 500 years old–older than Australia (and America, I might add).

After that, it was back to Peter’s for lunch and readings from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales (including his daughter reading her favorite poem “Matilda, Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death”).

One thing that’s hard to get used to (in a good way) is the sounds of Sydney: kookaburras laughing the trees, cockatoos, cicadas. It’s muggy high summer here and the breezes are redolent with greenness and life. But it’s a semi-tropical redolence that is nothing like Washington in high summer. You really feel the fact that you are in Another Land and very far from home. It feels… adventurous!

Of course, being me, all that adventurousness inspired me to desire (and take) a long, luscious, luxurious summer nap. That’s why God created Sunday! So I crashed and then got up and had dinner at the Golden Coronet restaurant across the street with John Gresser and the manager of the Mustard Seed bookshop, so we could cross our ts and dot our Is before things start tomorrow. Now I’m back in my room and about to crash again.

I will try to check in as I have time this week, but they’ve got me pretty booked up while I’m here and I have several chunks of work I need to get done in addition. So I can’t promise how often I’ll post. But I thought I’d check in and say “Howdy”.

So: Howdy! Hope all’ well back in the States. I see you are all enduring winter (tee hee!). I’ll crack open a lemonade and think fondly of the bleak February that I shall soon be savoring this week.

Toodles!