A turkey-less Thanksgiving vacation

Summer travels in New Zealand and Australia while friends at home shovel snow

Despite my Mayflower ancestry, revolutionary American roots and love for the traditional foods of our national holiday, 2024 was a lifetime first - turkey was not on the menu for Thanksgiving. We celebrated Thanksgiving dinner with the Chef’s Special (barramundi in a delicious sauce) at Tropical Fruit World in the Tweed Valley region of Australia’s Gold Coast, just north of Surfer’s Paradise.

A wild Australian Turkey at Point Danger, NSW unconcerned about Thanksgiving.

Timing for the trip down under has been the week long course my husband, Craig Madsen, enrolled in as part of his focus on building up his practice in soil health consulting. The course leads to a Certificate in Nutrition Farming from Nutri-Tech, based in Yandina, Queensland. Course description (and shameless plug for the resources of Craig Madsen Consulting):

The Certificate in Nutrition Farming® is essential training for food producers seeking a more profitable, productive and regenerative approach to farming. This internationally respected course teaches innovative, cutting-edge strategies to improve the health of your farm, your garden, your planet and yourself. https://nutri-tech.com.au/pages/courses

My office for the day at the headquarters of Nutri-Tech (https://nutri-tech.com.au/)

My plan was to post long thoughtful pieces regularly to Substack on the perspective of politics from down under. That’s not happened for two reasons. First, asking strangers on holiday to discuss politics at New Zealand’s Hobbiton or the tour train at Tropical Fruit World on the Gold Coast or on a beach or while admiring koalas at the Australia Zoo is just awkward.

Second, posting from the road has proved more difficult than I had planned, especially since we have been camping in a “caravan” ( self-contained RV) for much of our time in Australia. Free wi-fi is a minor challenge compared to public electrical receptacles to charge a laptop. Thanks to the loan of a power conversion plug from my sister, I was ready to deal with the 230 volt Type 1 outlets. The problem has been finding one.

I am accustomed to outlets in coffee shops and restaurants in the United States as an amenity to attract customers. Electrical codes in the US require outlets regularly and closely spaced to reduce the hazards of long cords. Not in New Zealand or Australia. A young man on staff here at Nutri-Tech Solutions is originally from Brazil and he finds the lack of outlets puzzling as well. He cheerfully rounded up an extension cord and moved some merchandise to find a single outlet in this 18 feet x 24 feet retail lobby where I have set up an office for the day. If/when I travel to Brazil, I’ll check out the outlet situation there!

One of the blessings of this past three weeks is simply the opportunity to travel. Not everyone has the means. For this opportunity and a whole bunch of mileage points we are truly thankful. We also give thanks to God for our shared sense of adventure, embracing the uncertainties in our itinerary and ready to follow the moment when we spot something interesting. Come along comfortably from your armchair or maybe you’ll pick up a tip or two for your next adventure! Herewith a non-political overview of the last three weeks.

At the beginning - in New Zealand

In mid-November, when we drove south from Auckland through the Rorotura caldera region at the center of North Island, we passed revelers in one town sporting matching gear reminiscent of Santa’s workshop. They gave the impression of a group of club volunteers coming from a holiday parade. It seemed odd to see community Christmas trees already shining in town centres of New Zealand (labeled with the proper British spelling) on November 14.

It dawned on us that without the Thanksgiving holiday, there was no restraining the starting date of the season celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, or the Saint Nikolaus/Santa Claus myth, or the frenzy of shopping, family feasting and gift giving. Another surprise was the ads for Black Friday popping up all over. Apparently America has exported that monstrosity as well. Bah humbug or happy holidays. It’s too early for Merry Christmas.

Besides me harrumphing at Christmas trees appearing right after Veterans Day (or Remembrance Day as it is known in the Commonwealth countries of the former British Empire), our week in New Zealand included:

· An afternoon touring the largest intact movie set in the world hosting the Hobbits and the Lord of the Rings stories. Delightful experience, and still a working sheep and cattle ranch going into it’s fourth generation of family operators.

· Visiting the sheep farm featured in the last Substack post and making new friends (https://suelanimadsen.substack.com/p/travels-in-new-zealand)

· Sunday worship with our farmer friends at a growing evangelical congregation, currently meeting in a local middle school after they outgrew their building.

· Beaches. Waterfalls. Ocean

· A walking tour of the Art Deco treasures of Napier, courtesy of the town being wiped out just at the start of the trend and being rebuilt quickly and in the latest style.

· A variety of lodging experiences in addition to several ordinary motels, including an AirBnB cottage next to a river with sheep grazing peacefully beyond our front porch, an accidentally luxurious hotel suite when we arrived in one good size beach town just after they figuratively rolled up the sidewalks at 8pm and the only innkeeper answering her bell had only one room to offer (at least it wasn’t a stable), and ending the week at a budget airport motel (shared bathroom down the hall) for our flight out the next morning.

We survived travel on one-lane bridges and narrow winding roads made narrower by cyclone damage, roads shared with very large trucks and locals taking the 100 km/hr speed limit seriously. We celebrated returning the rental car without damage. We already want to return to New Zealand. We’ll have to start saving those mileage credits again.

On to Australia

Our itinerary started with a planned three day stay in Brisbane at a backpackers hostel, appropriately named Somewhere To Stay Backpackers Hostel. While hostels are known for multi-bed dorm room accommodation, most if not all also have a few private rooms available. We had a room to ourselves with a double bed and the use of a well-appointed commercial kitchen with eight cooking stations. So much fun to be cooking alongside young (and a few older) people from around the world, people who shared spices and advice, cleaned up to leave things better than they found them, and respected each other’s tagged bags of food in the commercial cooler.

On our second day in Brisbane, we joined one of the hostel staff as our guide for a "Bush Hike" in the city, through the Botanic Gardens and up Mount Coot-Tha. Our guide was Dutch, most of the other hostelers were German. If you stay at hostels anywhere, there will be German tourists, German employers are known for very generous vacation time policies supporting long distance travel. I could pick up a word of conversation here and there, Duolingo may be paying off.

Turning back from the view over the city, the sole of my shoe delaminated just before boarding the hostel van for the trip back “home.” We performed one of our Amazing Race style challenges to locate and travel to a shoe repair shop, and if all goes well (shoes fixed and we find the shop again) they’ll be ready to pick up just before we head to the airport on the way home on December 9. We also walked by a Doc Martens Shoe store while searching and I bought a new pair for the rest of the trip. I needed new shoes, there was a sale, and a favorable exchange rate! Serendipity!

After exploring Brisbane for our third day and being delayed by a museum tour guide who was very interesting as well as very (very) detailed, we headed out late by train and bus to pick up our caravan for the rest of the trip. We almost missed picking it up and would have been left with nowhere to sleep that night. There’s a longer story there, but the short one is we were saved by Mark, a friendly Aussie businessman who was about to close up shop for the evening and let a dripping wet American use his wifi to get directions, then volunteered to give two dripping wet Americans a ride to the garage where the proprietor had not given up on our arrival and cheerfully got us on our way.

International travel for us has always offered many opportunities to discover the best faces of human nature across cultures and continents. We’re all just muddling through on an uncertain itinerary, complaining of speeding drivers and wondering where the best bakery can be found. There may be opportunities to discuss politics with the Aussies at the workshop, it’s not an odd subject to bring up to farmers here on business. Farmers everywhere are impacted by a myriad of government policies. We’ll see what surfaces for a final “down under” Substack post on travel in Australia beyond whingeing about electrical receptacles (whingeing is a useful British word, not at all the same as whining https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/03/on-whinge-and-whine.html and giving the added pleasure of confounding autocorrect).

A final blessing –catching up on our reading lists

We’ve been mostly disconnected from the internet, except for downloading maps when we can snag a bit of free wi-fi and occasionally posting photos to Facebook for friends and family. We both brought books, lots of books, we pass them back and forth and have had time to read uninterrupted by the demands of daily life or the incessant notifications of email, texts, voice mail, etc. Even better, we’ve had time to share excerpts aloud and discuss what we’re learning. Bits of these books will likely make an appearance in Substack posts in 2025.

Ellen F. Davis with Forward by Wendell Berry, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, Cambridge University Press (2009)

Anneliese Abbott, Malabar Farm: Louis Bromfield, Friends of the Land and the Rise of Sustainable Agriculture, The Kent State University Press (2021)

Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, Box of Crayons Press (2016)

Maria Schmidt, From Country to Nation: Thirty Years of Freedom, Public Foundation for Research on Central and Eastern European History and Society. 2021. (Note: A purchase from a previous vacation in Hungary.)

James Gleick, Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable, Vintage/The Random House Group Ltd (1998). First published by William Heinemann Ltd., 1988 (We’d both made it halfway through and had been struggling to concentrate on complex mathematics; vacation is perfect for hour long reading sessions.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (With a New Section: “On Robustness & Fragility), Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010 Edition. (Reading this aloud together and discussing as we go.)

Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, Seal Press/Hachette Book Group, 2022. (Recommended by a courageous young friend who stepped into a debate on social media post of mine on trans ideology with civility, knowing her point of view was counter to almost everyone on the thread. I recommended she read the Joyce book cited below for well-grounded background, she agreed if I’d read the Heyam book. We’ll be meeting in December for coffee to discuss what we each learned. Definitely a Substack post on these two.)

Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Oneworld Publications, 2021. (Finished before trip as part of book exchange challenge with the Heyam book listed above, didn’t pack this one!)

M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, Island Press (2022)

Rice Broocks, God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty, W Publishing Group: An Imprint of Thomas Nelson, 2013. (Note: Saving this for the travel home, seem to have the most interesting conversations with agnostics and atheists when I read a title like this on a plane or in an airport.)

Georgette Heyer, No Wind of Blame, Sourcebooks Inc, 2009. (Note: Stuck in the suitcase at the last minute in case I got tired of reading non-fiction. An old-fashioned murder mystery!)