Happy birthday, italiano—don’t celebrate too hard, you should be saving for Z.

Z commences tomorrow, July 1st. Photograms taken from the trip will be featured in the inaugural volume of Lachlan has a Digital Camera.

Props to Kryz for taking care of most of the travel arrangements. A winner is you.

I picked up some travel attire today including a space-age, water-proof, wind-proof jacket. I hope it’s theft and misplacement proof.

There’s about a dozen travel outfitters on Wickham Street, all adjacent to each other, and they all do very good business. This is an example of what one might call the McDonald’s Effect¹ .

Feels good to be travelling again. If you think it is cold in Brisbane at the moment, spare a thought for us landing in Christchurch tomorrow evening. Recently it has been as cold as –5°C, although it should stay above freezing when we are there.

¹  Obviously, I’m not talking about the same McDonald’s Effect whereby no two countries with a McDonald’s restaurant have been at war with each other, nor the one describing the idea that McDonald’s homogenises foreign cultures and makes Japanese people obese. This is a different one.