Preconceived Notions is a feature I do before traveling to a new place. I think it will be interesting to see how my impressions of a place change once I get to know it. Disclaimer: the whole point of this exercise is to expose my ignorance, please don’t @ me telling me how wrong I am. That is the point. Thank you.

The very first house sit I set up when I conceived of this mission was to take place in Australia. More than six months prior, I agreed to head down under to take care of two Russian Blue kitties just outside of Melbourne.

I’d been to Australia before, but while I was studying abroad I never made it down to Melbourne, let alone to the Melbourne suburbs. As it is a very large country, I think it is fair enough to not expect to know what one area is like having experienced a few others.

Before arriving to my house sit in Geelong, I was honestly not expecting anything too extraordinary. When I first arrived in Australia in 2004, my immediate impression on the shuttle from the airport to our dorms was, “Ah, it’s like if Canada and Florida had a baby.”

Unlike that journey, this trip will not be in the tropics. Geelong is a large suburb outside of Melbourne, so I was imagining a pretty normal place, maybe even painfully so, such as Highlands Ranch (Colorado), or Stamford (Connecticut), or Quincy (Massachusetts), etc.

Kangaroo
Obviously, I’d see a lot of these bad boys

Having done this flight before, one thing I was really dreading was the exceptionally long journey across the Pacific. When I flew from L.A. to Sydney in 2004, I didn’t have the best time. I am not the best sleeper even in the coziest of circumstances, so sleeping on a plane certainly doesn’t come easily. For the flight, I decided to take a bunch of NyQuil, have a couple of glasses of wine and pass out.

NyQuil, it turns out, is for babies, and was not at all strong enough to take me down. So, instead of sleeping, at all, I was awake the whole flight but was really, really exhausted the whole time. It was torture. After learning this lesson on the way there, I resigned to stay up the full 15 hours on the way back, and it was much better.

Going into this house sit, I basically was just imagining super friendly people, tasty, slightly weird food (Tim Tams PLEASE), döner kebabs for me to munch on, inexpensive shopping, etc.

Since I wasn’t able to come to this part of the country during my last trip down under, I intended to go see the Great Ocean Road (did I make it?! Only those who don’t follow my social media don’t know). I was also planning to take a couple of train rides into Melbourne proper and explore the city. I also thought I would ideally take advantage of the lack of language barrier and do some more comedy. All in all, I expected to meet some more folks, chill out, and get some writing done.

Stay tuned to see if my expectations were spot on.