This and That and The Other and The SNAKE

This last week has been mainly characterized by rainy days, good meals, great conversation and a yearning to fly far. The last two days have had decent local flying conditions. Yesterday I flew Nina's glider, the XS Niviuk Hook. It was great fun to get off my demanding competition glider and fly around on a mellow user friendly wing. I spent an hour or so in the air getting high over launch and doing tricks to burn altitude. Today I flew for a few hours spending most of the time experimenting with lift lines that were forming in front of launch.

This morning I drove the superflash Rivergumsmobile to Tamworth (45k away) to drop my great friend Nina off at the train station. Nina and I have traveled around together for most of my trip here in Australia and it was a sad goodbye but an amazing time spent together.

This morning while packing her tent we lifted it up from the ground and found that a lovely one meter brown snake had been living underneath it. Brown snakes don't look so mean but they can be quite aggressive. Their venom is deadly if untreated and they are responsible for most of the deaths by snakebite in Australia. We did not know what type of snake it was at the time, though we assumed it was poisonous. Considering it was in the middle of the caravan park I felt a bit of an obligation to attempt and remove it from the area; its proximity to my tent (2 meters) encouraged this behavior. After trying to try and pick it up with a branch it slithered into Nina's tarp so I drug the tarp 100 meters to some bushes on the edge of the park and shook it off. This whole event has given me not the best feeling in my stomach, especially after finding out it was a deadly brown snake.

On another note, my trip is nearing its end. I leave Australia on April 22nd and head back to the U.S. I plan to stay around SLC/Moab for a few weeks before moving down to the great state of Colorado where I will spend my summer flying tandems for tourists in Glenwood Springs and hopefully saving up a bunch of dough. I plan to work hard this summer; I have been fully stung by the dreaded travel bug and am surely going to try and take another trip come next November. I am thinking it will be to the great Himalayan Mountains of India, Nepal and Pakistan; and I am thinking it will last about 5-6 months.