Well the drive across Australia was definitely an experience I won't forget.  5000km over 7 days, and through some of the hottest weather I've ever experienced.  I won't bore you with the details of every little thing that went on, but here are some of the highlights.  Hopefully I'll be able to get to a computer that won't crash when I put photos up, so you can see some of the trip (and the 20 year old pop-top camper that we drove in).

The first night, after driving for 11 hours or so, we were still a ways from anywhere decent to camp, so ended up just pulling over on the side of the road to crash.  That was after I almost ran over an echidna - figures the first real Australian wildlife I see I almost kill.  All night there were road trains (think transport trucks with 2 or 3 trailers, usually 35 to 50 meters in length) barreling by all night, but somehow I was able to sleep. 

The guy I was driving with is actually from Perth, but he had driven across earlier in the year, and decided he wanted to head home for Christmas.  We stopped in Echuca, a small town a few hours north of Melbourne, where he used to work, and spent a day and night there, catching up with some of his old friends.

The following 4 days was getting to the beginning of the Nullarbor Plain, and then crossing it.  It's supposed to mean "No Trees" in Latin, but there was still a surprising amount of growth around - not the red desert that most people think Australia is like (although there's plenty of that in the interior, I just haven't really seen much of it).  The drive across was mind-numbingly boring.  Every hour or two we'd pass a roadhouse, which is basically a gas station with a couple people who live there, in the middle of nowhere - and that's all of "civilization" we'd see.  A couple of days it got up to 45 degrees in the afternoons - we'd be getting up at 5am just to get as much distance in before it got too hot, and try to get to a suitable place to spend the afternoons.  It was so hot that you'd be just dripping with sweat, and if you stuck your arm out of the van, it was like a hairdryer on full, and it'd dry your arm off in seconds. 

One day we got stuck at the most horrible roadhouse, and the "locals" weren't too friendly.  You'd think they would be, since they only see people driving across the plain, but nope ... they were jerks.  It was barely noon, already 45 degrees, and the last place we wanted to be stuck - but when you're driving a 20 year old van, it doesn't really like to drive when it's that hot.  So we sat there for an hour, hoping for some miracle, which came in the form of a weather front from the Southern Ocean - dropping the temperature about 10 degrees, cool enough to get to the next place and spend the night.  Middle of nowhere, called Midura, but it was actually a really nice place - I highly recommend it :>  Even though we still had a couple days of driving left ahead of us, we celebrated the fact that we'd made it across (the worst was behind us at least).

Did I mention we saw a few cyclists along the way?  I don't know why anyone would want to cycle 1500km or so across this desolate wasteland.  But they did.  The morning after leaving Midura, we drove through the 90 mile stretch - a dead straight road that's about 145km or so.  I'm glad I was the passenger, I would have definitely fallen asleep at the wheel.  We even thought of locking the steering wheel in place with bungee cords and playing cards, but everytime a road train passed us doing 140km/h or so, it shook the van so badly it was a fight to keep it on the road. So we made it to Perth with no breakdowns (mental ones notwithstanding), and I met up with Tim a couple of days later.  Most of the time I was actually in Albany (about 4 hours south of Perth, on the southern coast of West Australia), with his parents.  That's where I spent Christmas, and also got to go deep sea fishing (caught a pink snapper, but had to throw it back because it was too small), climbed the highest peak in WA (Bluff knoll - 1109 meters), and did an overnight trail hike and camping on the Bibbulmun Track.  The track is around 980km long, and goes from Perth to Albany, although we only did a small fraction of it, maybe 25km or so.

New Years found us back in Perth, where Tim and I went to a BBQ with some of his old university friends, then a few of us went down to Leighton Beach where there were some more university people, and we just sat on the beach with a small fire (for light, not heat - it was still 20 degrees at midnight), and rang in the New Year.

The rest of the time recently has been sitting around, reading, and just relaxing, trying to figure out what's going to happen next.  I'm back up in Perth for a week, and then Tim and I are flying to Melbourne to meet up with some of his friends from the Antarctic, and I hope to meet up with Karen as well.  I'll also be looking for a job there.  After that - well not really sure, but I'll let you all know about a month after it all happens ;)