2023 Travel Wrap-up: Oh, The Places I Went!

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel for 2023 ran right up to within 12 hours of the New Year... when I returned from a phenomenal trip to Australia on midday December 31.

Here are Five Things about my travel in 2023:

1. I traveled 92 days and 81 nights in 2023. That splits out as 22 days/17 nights business travel and 70 days/64 nights leisure travel. Overall these figures are up about 15% over my stats from 2022 and much higher than the pandemic years of 2020-2021. I'm not quite back to recent pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, for example, I logged 115 days and 103 nights of travel. And even those figures are well below my gonzo days of travel in the late 00s/early 10s.


2. It's satisfying that leisure is 75% of my travel. That's a turnaround from 10-15 years ago when leisure was less than half, sometimes as little as one-third of my travel. The shift in the ratio is due partly to fewer business trips and partly to making more leisure trips. There's a big element of intentionality in the latter; we've got to plan to spend time traveling. And generally we do, though not always as much as we'd like. For example, we didn't travel as much in the summer this past year as we usually do. It's not just that there was no big trip but there weren't even many weekend getaways. Partly that was due to weather patterns but also partly it was due to us being less aggressive about making trips happen for a few months.


3. Business travel's "New Normal" after Coronavirus. Business travel has partly come back after Coronavirus. Trade shows are all in full swing again. That's what most of my business travel this year involved. In-person visits to customers remain much slower than before. That's not due to Coronavirus restrictions on workplace visitors anymore (it was in 2021 & 2022) but due to the greater shift to remote work. Widely publicized "RTO" (return to office) mandates notwithstanding, the kinds of customers I call on work in-office maybe one day a week. They prefer not to make a special trip into the office just to meet a vendor when they feel they can get everything they need in a videoconference. Plus, the trend of distributed teams continues to grow. Workers can't come in to the (same) office when the company hired them across multiple states and countries.


4. I flew 47,500 miles in 2023. That's a step up from the past few years when Coronavirus put the kibosh on a lot of flying. I flew 11k in 2020 (all in Jan/Feb), 21k in 2021, and 32k last year. 2023's tally represents a return to my recent pre-pandemic average of 50k miles/year. Though 2023 would have been a lot like 2022 if we didn't come up with the idea of traveling to Australia late in the year. And even this amount is nothing like the 150k+/year I flew back in the late 00s/early 10s when I was a globe-trotting business traveler.


5. Bucket List items checked off: 3 🪣✔. After making a miserable zero progress on my bucket lists in 2022 I made progress on three (all three?) in 2023. I visited one more state, Mississippi, bringing my list to 50/51. I visited one more US national park, New River Gorge in West Virginia, upping my count to 52/63. And I visited two more foreign countries, Cayman Islands and Australia, bringing my tally to 21 countries.

More 2023 retrospectives to come.

Australian Road Warrior

Australia Travelog #19
Leura, NSW - Wed, 27 Dec 2023, 10pm

Today was a full day of driving in Australia. We put 404 km on our rented car. That's 251 miles in US units... not really a lot of distance by US standards, at least not western US standards, but this was in an unfamiliar road-scape. Driving in Australia is on the left side of the road, opposite of the US, and the cars are right-hand drive, also opposite of the US. That made driving 251 miles a much heavier cognitive load.

Where did we go?

I've already written about a lot of what we did today, so I'll summarize here with links to recent blog posts:

• We Ubered to the airport to pick up our rental car, a Renault SUV
• We hiked Fitzroy Falls and visited Kangaroo(less) Valley for lunch
• We drove to, and hiked, Belmore Falls and Carrington Falls
• We checked out what Costco is like in Australia

And now we're at our destination for the night, the Fairmont hotel in Leura, NSW. It's in the Blue Mountains, where we'll be driving around for various sightseeing and hiking over the next few days.

Five Things about Driving in Australia

I started the day concerned about how hard it would be to drive in a foreign country. 400+ km later here's what I found, in the form of Five Things:

1. I thought driving on the left would be hard but it wasn't, in context. It was actually easy to "remember" to stay on the opposite side of the road when there's traffic. The other vehicles provide contextual cues about where to be.


2. Sitting on the right side challenged my senses of position. It's not just the lane directions that are the opposite of the US, it's sitting on the opposite (right-hand) side of the car. This threw off my sense of position on things. Not only did I have to reorient myself each time as I approached the parked car to enter the correct door, but I fumbled a bit with having to shift gears and use the hand brake with my left hand. Plus it's harder to sense where the opposite corner of the car is when making tight turns. Frankly all this is a harder acclimation than staying left on the road.


3. Driving in Australia is orderly. One thing I've observed in visiting various foreign countries and thinking, "Would I want to drive here?" is that, in some, driving is a chaos. In some Asian countries, for example, the roads are kind of free-for-alls. Lanes, signs, traffic lights, the correct direction; these are all merely suggestions. Australia is very much not like that. Drivers obey signs, rules, and even courtesies like merging neatly when a lane ends, instead of 1/3 of the people rushing around the queue trying to get ahead of everyone else. In that regard it's better than the US.


4. Speed limits are low. In city traffic the speed limits are reasonable. 40 km/h is comparable to 25 mph in the US, and it's what's safe to drive at on urban streets. But on the open highway the speed limits are slow to increase. I did see limits as high as 110 km/h but only in very remote areas. Multi-lane highways near the city were still signed as low as 80 km/h (about 50mph) and even when the regular speed was higher, any spot of construction would slow things down to 80 or even 60.


5. Drivers obey speed limits! This was honestly the freakiest thing I experienced in a day of driving in Australia. Whatever the posted speed limit is, drivers obey it. There's no cultural ethos of speeding like in the US, where many drivers consider it normal to go at least 10mph faster than the posted limit. In Australia if the sign says 110 (that's 66mph) by and large everybody is driving at most 110. I could set cruise control to the signed limit and stay with traffic. And when the limit dropped to 80, say because of construction, everybody actually slowed down. Like, you'd see everyone's brake lights come on because they're actively slowing to 80 as they pass the 80 sign. Wild!

The Three Sisters and the Blue Mountains

Australia Travelog #20
Katoomba, NSW - Thu, 28 Dec 2023, 11:30am

This morning we slept in a bit. That was our prerogative after a long day yesterday; we did three hikes and a lot of driving. And part of the purpose of all that driving was to get here last night so we'd only need to drive a few more miles to any of the many trails we wanted to hike. BTW by "slept in" I mean we didn't wake until our 7am alarms... then snoozed them a few times. 😨 Maybe we're finally over our jet-lag now. It'll be nice to be done with that waking-up-at-4am crap.

Anyway, our first* hike of the day was to visit the Three Sisters at Echo Point in Katoomba.



The Three Sisters (photo above) is one of the iconic sights of the Blue Mountains National Park in New South Wales, Australia. You can see it from Echo Point, which is right at the edge of town in Katoomba. And in this case edge is kind of literal. Take a few steps too far and you fall off the edge of the plateau.



From Echo Point there's an easy, paved walk along the cliff rim. As you approach the closer viewing platform there's good and bad news. Good news: you see lots of the valley opening up before you. Bad news: from this angle the two little Sisters are hiding behind their bigger Sister.

Also kind of bad news? Even on a weekday this area is thronged with people. Though, granted, it is kind of a holiday week between Christmas and New Year's. Plus, it's literal summer vacation time for school kids. (Signs in town say the next school year starts Feb 1.)



From the viewing platform next to the Three Sisters there's a steep staircase going down. It goes all the way down to the valley, over 300m below; but a lot of people descend it just 70m or so to the base of the spire. Even though these stairs are strenuous they're still crowded. You can see in the photo above the line of people hoofing it down.



Near the base of the spire of the biggest Sister is a spot called the Wedding Bridge. It's actually a bridge (man-made), as you can see in the photo above. And it's not thronged with people... because it's closed and gated off! I think some dumbasses managed to fall and die, and authorities closed it for our safety. It's disappointing when the dumbest people ruin it for the other 999/1,000 of us.

I hoofed it back up the stairs after enjoying the views near the Wedding Bridge. Hawk and I discussed whether we'd want to go all the way down this trail... and decided that if we do hike to the valley floor we'll do it in a different area, near one of the waterfalls. So I went back up to the top from here, and we strolled back to our car at Echo Point.

Now, you may have noticed up near the top I put a star next to it when I said this was our first hike of the day. Actually it's kind of our second. First we went to a viewpoint for Wentworth Falls, several miles away. But we couldn't see the falls from the viewpoint, and we decided that before we went looking for them we'd come over here to Echo Point, where there's a visitors information center. Now we have all the info— and we visited the Three Sisters since they're right here— so we'll head back to hike Wentworth Falls after lunch.