Some of you may have seen that myself and my two kids are on an adventure. My eldest daughter Remie chose an oversubscribed high school and as we knew she wouldn’t be at school this term while we wait for a place we decided it was a perfect time to travel to distant shores in search of new stores to carry Forivor and new adventures to sustain our hearts and minds.
With a growing interest in Forivor in Japan and long lost friends aplenty in Australia, the choice of where to go was easy. We are in the final week now of our trip and I’m sure I will be writing more about it over the next few months as we have time to digest all that we’ve seen and experienced back home in our regular routines. 
In the meantime, I wanted to share something that felt particularly relevant to the reason we exist and as we are on a long 15 hour train journey from Sydney to Brisbane it felt like the perfect opportunity to put my thoughts down. It’s been a beautiful journey so far with vast stretches of incredible scenery to enjoy out the window.
Rolling hills and forests interspersed with sparkling rivers and lakes (many of them covered with water lilies and with herons stalking their fish) and as we trundled further towards Queensland, momentary glimpses of sandy aqua estuaries. The delicate violet beauty of Jacaranda trees has marked the arrival of towns and villages and their (often) very old fashioned train stations along the way.
Taryn has been reading, writing comic strips inspired by greek gods from Percy Jackson and playing for hours with a small selection of lego men we bought with us as well as his new favourite toy, Clixo (number one on our Christmas wish list now).
Remie is deep into her third series of novels she’s ploughed through on this trip and updating her trip journal which I’m not allowed to see yet but I know it will be a thing of beauty. We’ve seen and done so much since we left home in September that having a whole day to be forced to sit still and just play or look out the window feels like a welcome and important rest despite how tiring travel inevitably is.
I’ve written about this before but I often feel that as parents in a digital age we don’t have enough faith in kids and perhaps ourselves to just let children find their own way without constant entertainment or digital devices.
We often make the overland journey from Wales to Sardinia to visit family and I know we all delight in the adventure of it but I’m pretty sure we've all learnt a lot about relaxing into a journey from those trips. There are always times when giving your child a screen would be easier (and I definitely do let my kids watch TV after a long day to unwind and relax) but on long journeys I like them to practice just being self sufficient. To learn to just let time flow past when it needs to. Of course there are moments of frustration, but largely they are incredible travel companions and the long train trips we've taken will be such memorable parts of their childhoods for all of us.
Today’s journey time has given me a great opportunity to reflect on some of the last few weeks experiences though (and yes I had my laptop out which felt a bit unfair on the kids while I wrote this and caught up on a bit of work).
We were lucky enough to go and visit the Dubbo Observatory last week whilst visiting a friend. It’s a privately run observatory in the central tablelands of New South Wales with exceptionally good night sky viewing because of the lack of light pollution. Seeing a beautiful clear image of Saturn through the telescope was the major highlight of the night for all of us, we also saw many different planets and constellations but the thing that will perhaps be the most memorable and has made me reflect on the power of knowledge for our imagination was seeing the International Space Station clearly tracking across the night sky.
The man running the observatory had told us it would pass by at approximately 9h20 pm - which it of course did. Later at home that evening I checked the news and saw a live stream from the space station had started about the same time filming astronauts doing a space walk to replace solar arrays - the first time in 15 years.
Suddenly the picture I had of the international space station turned into a much more dramatic mental view of astronauts in zero gravity and enormous space suits busy at work on the outside of the station. It transformed what was simply a dot passing through the night sky into the delight of their bulky suits doing something as precise as changing a solar array whilst charging through the night sky at 25,000km/hr above us. I also learnt that they have to wait to be in the earth's shadow to do this work which is exactly where they were when we saw them.
It reminded me of the power of knowledge and the importance of curiosity in the world around us to spark our imaginations. When observing nature (and the stars) we are often filling in information to build a world around what we can actually see. Looking at a star through a telescope - its really just a dot of white light, but what makes it interesting is what we know about that white light - how long it has taken to reach our eyes and the eternal human fascination with how small we are in the magnitude of our galaxy and beyond. It’s from here the power of creativity surely begins, in using our imaginations to understand what we see rather than simply just seeing it.
This interplay between knowledge, enjoyment and creative inspiration feels particularly related to Forivor and the worlds we try to create. We want children and families to learn about the wildlife, the stars, the creatures swimming in the deep blue sea, the plants around us - so that when you see them you can not only identify them (as fun as that is) but understand what you are seeing with depth so that your mind can fill in the gaps and give you a delight. Both in the factual reality but also in what that knowledge does in terms of creating images in your mind to build stories and expand your thinking.
Pictures in this blog are a mixture of mine and Remie's and one taken of the milky way and a star I can't remember the name of the night we were at Dubbo Observatory that they kindly let me put on my memory card.
A few thoughts on Australian trains for anyone interested:
- They are relatively slow but the scenery is beautiful and its very relaxing
- for a train service the food is decent enough and very reasonably priced. Hot meals are a mixed bag but perfectly okay.
- 1st class and 2nd class seem to be pretty much identical other than luggage allowance as far as we could tell.
- there are no power points on the trains so be prepared with your batteries fully charged!
- Fun fact, as its a single track line, once the train reaches its destination the train staff turn all the chairs in all the carriages to face the other direction so you are always facing the direction of travel. Yes every single seat!
