Reuniting with a real traveller

All this travel, new places, new faces and new things to try. Sometimes you wonder if all the old faces and people in your life still exist. I chat online when I can with people I know but there is a lot to be said for meeting people face to face and sharing time together that way. In the last 1 ½ years since splitting with the last of my family I have met some amazing people and made many new friends, but with the exception of reuniting with Ben, I have not met up with anyone I had met or known previously. This past Christmas probably felt the least Christmasy of my life as it was the first one completely on my own. Ya, there is more celebration here than somewhere like Timbuktu but somehow it all seems to have missed me. The factory shut down for 2 days over Christmas (my first 2 days off in a row since early Nov) and I didn't really know what to do with myself. I ended up just hanging out with some of the guys at the hostel juggling and playing video games.
A few days later I had a short meet up with Jim Fenton, a guy we'd met in Ghana (at the same place we met Ben and Kees). He's a school teacher in LA and he was just passing through Brisbane on another of his trips around the world. He kindly added a night here so we could meet for dinner and a brief catching up. He's been to 183 countries now and is a real inspiration (and great source of info) for someone like me. It's not often you meet someone attempting to visit every country in the world and nearly succeeding in it so you have to keep track of them. He's now visited every country in the South Pacific, my next destination, so most of our conversation was about that and whether or not travelling is ever “finished”. It was a good couple of hours and he's off again to more exotic destinations.
My time will come soon. My new year's resolution is to travel more this year ;)
I seem to somehow miss out on a lot of New Year's celebrations the last few years. I worked a 12 hour shift on New Year's Eve, finishing at 3am. We ran outside onto one of the bridges to see the fireworks at midnight and then went back to work. The fireworks are much more impressive for the Riverfire display during the Brisbane festival actually. There had been a mass exodus from our hostel previously as apparently the only place to be for New Year's in Australia is Sydney and everyone ran off to go see/do it.
I must be doing something right at work. There are 3 types of people working there, permanents, permanent casuals and casuals. One of the coordinators likes me enough that I am now getting called in in week-long blocks like the permanent casuals which means I don't have to wait for a call everyday and I can organize the rest of my life a lot better. This is perfect for me too as rumour has it that things will slow down a lot soon and a lot of the casuals are going to get most of their shifts axed. This way I should still be able to get full-time work. It also helps that there are only 2 major milk factories in Queensland for our stuff and the other one in Rockhampton is out of action due to the floods everywhere these days. A lot of our milk trucks are only coming in half full too because of lost access to farms, etc.. For now I will continue to work as much as I can, and I'm in the middle of another 9 days on, 1 day off stretch that I always seem to be getting.
Ammon