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Reports

During my travels, I received free accommodation for a night in exchange for writing a daily travel diary. This diary documented how I reached my next destination, the hosts who welcomed me, the food I was offered, and other experiences along the way. Below, you will find the archives of these extensive reports. Please note that English is not my native language, and most entries were written quickly, often around midnight. Enjoy!
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Monday, 1 April 2002
Cornubia --> Drewvale, Brisbane, Australia

It was an easy going April Fool's Day for me, as I moved on to the address of Kylie and Wayne Dunkley, living in the suburb Drewvale.
Wayne works at a big storage depot in the city, where people can store whatever they want for a long time and Wayne is chiefly the man who sits there and arranges it all and takes care of it all. “It’s very easy job and I am quite happy with it."

I spent the morning in Stephen’s garage office to update my reports, before the family offered to drop me off at my next destination, only some fifteen minutes up the road in the Brisbane suburb of Springwood.

It was at the office of the Albert and Logan News where I met up with Kylie Dunkley, a reporter at the local newspaper. She contacted me after seeing me on Channel 9 TV and also offered me a place to stay.

Of course, while I was there (where everybody just didn’t really want to make a newspaper on Easter Monday) I had to be eternalised and photographed for the newspaper. The whole newsroom already knew about me and was very thrilled with my easy ability to travel the world like I do.

Even the big boss Ray wanted to have a word with me in his room. He was simply captivated by my stories and loved it all. “What a great world we live in!” he said.

As Kylie had to work until late in the afternoon, she asked her husband Wayne to pick me up at her work and take me to their home. There I’d have some time to work on my writing or have a snooze. Sounded good to me!

It met up with Wayne and he dropped me off in their new home in the new suburb Drewvale. And this is something you’d never see in Europe. Drewvale is a piece of land, once owned by one person and who designed a whole suburban village on it. Together with shopping malls, streets and little spots of land, he sold the whole thing to a real estate agency, which also earned a lot of money with it.

And suddenly, there it was: Drewvale, another pre-designed suburb in Australia. It is just too scary to me and I am happy things don’t work like that so easy in Europe as we don’t have much land free to fill up like this. We Europeans live too packed to each other and we even like it that way…

The Dunkley’s married each other last year and their home had been finished in October last year. In his spare time, Wayne works on the house and is still working on several rooms in the house and putting filling between all the tiles.

Wayne works at a big storage depot in the city, where people can store whatever they want for a long time and Wayne is chiefly the man who sits there and arranges it all and takes care of it all. “It’s very easy job and I am quite happy with it,” said the former pizza-delivery boy to me.

I connected my laptop and started typing my things, reading emails (still some few hundreds a day) and corresponded a bit with friends and family - who I miss.

After five Kylie came back from the newspaper and prepared a spaghetti Bolognese for dinner in a (yet) very empty dining room. They have this great little Labrador-puppy Roxy that I almost wanted to take along with me, just looking so lovely and looking for a bit of dinner.

After dinner Kylie asked me what they should do tonight, which always results in my standard answer that you don’t have to do anything special because I was there. And that was fine with the Dunkley’s.

They settled in front of the TV and we watched one of their videos from their collection. We watched Executive Decision, which had Steven Seagal featuring as the main character on the cover, but unfortunately his character died in the first fifteen minutes of the movie about extremists wanting to blow up the entire eastern seaboard of the US.

For me this was an easy going April Fool’s Day as nothing happened with me and nobody fooled me (and thanks to my heavy virus protection on my laptop I have to disappoint those who just love to send me those mail bombs, haha).

Tomorrow I’d be staying in the middle of the Brisbane city centre, let’s see how that differs from suburban life…

Good night Drewvale!

Ramon.

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