For god’s sake, man, what kind of friends are you? Why have none of you ever had the common decency to tell me that I’m bald? Not receding, not thinning, not qui perd ses cheveux as they say in the French. Bald!

I swear this is true. I look in the mirror every morning and think, Why was I so worried that my father and my eight uncles were bald? I still have a very nice head of hair.

I had a similar delusion a few years ago. I was convinced that my gray hair was slowly getting darker thanks to a supplement I was taking, and that soon, at the rate it was progressing, I would be coiffed like a young Ronald Reagan. My friend Dan was kind enough to tell me I was a freakin’ moron and that my hair was, in fact, getting even whiter.

Today Jamie showed me a series of photos from which the one above was taken.

I HAVE NO HAIR, PEOPLE. I’M ONE STEP REMOVED FROM CUE BALL TERRITORY. I’M NOT RECEDING, I’VE RECEDED FARTHER AND FASTER THAN A FRENCH ARMY FLEEING A BATTLE FIELD. MY HEAD LOOKS LIKE A BABY’S ASS.

I’m upset with all of you. Very upset. One of you should have taken me aside and told me.

This has ruined my trip around the world.

I hope you’re happy.

“Hey, Jim”, I can hear you saying, “Why is this blog item datelined Honolulu? I don’t see Honolulu on your itinerary.”

Good question.

This was going to be a story about how unexpectedly well, how remarkably well, in fact, that this trip has gone. How we never missed a flight nor a train. How every piece of luggage arrived where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be there. How we never had a bad hotel except in the outback where our expectations were reasonably low. How we never had a really bad meal. How we never lost anything. How incredibly healthy we’ve been. How warmly we’ve been greeted and treated everywhere we’ve gone.

But then we got to the last 24 hours of the trip.

First, Jamie dropped and broke her camera. But our glasses are half full and we said, “What the hell. All the photos are still there on a memory card and it could have been worse — it could have been Day 1 instead of Day 184.”

While we were waiting to board our flight at the Sydney airport, we tried to recall any bad experiences we’ve had. Our best efforts failed. All we could come up with was a very short, truly insignificant list (below).

We boarded our 3:20 pm flight for the United States, had delicious Business Class meals, rolled down our fully-reclining seats and prepared to sleep in the arms of Morpheus until we were gently awakened for a scrumptious breakfast just before landing in the USA.

No such luck.

About 7 hours into the 14 hour flight we were shaken awake in a pitch black cabin by a flight attendant who said, “The plane is having electrical problems and the flight is diverting to Honolulu.”

To make a long story short, we landed in Honolulu, sat on the tarmac for three hours before they finally cancelled the flight and let us leave the plane, waited an hour for our luggage, and then waited another two hours in line with 400 other people who all needed to find alternate flights back home. They gave us vouchers for cabs and food and a hotel room and sent us on our way.

Consider this the answer to the question, “When would you least want to go to Hawaii?” We spent most of our day in Honolulu sleeping. We’re still here and we’re not quite sure when we’ll arrive back in the good ol’ USA.

But enough of today’s negative fiddle faddle. Remember when I said we put our heads together to come up with a list of every bad experience we’ve had in the last six months? We managed to count them all on one hand:

The Trans-Siberian train – Hey, it wasn’t the Ritz, but it was a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime experience that we’ll laugh about for the rest of our lives. And unlike today’s United flight, it arrived at its destination on time.
The flight from Hong Kong to Perth – Our flight got cancelled and we ended up flying through Manila and Melbourne, but we still ended up in Perth less than five hours after we were supposed to arrive. Not bad. And we had quite a little adventure being whisked through the bowels of the Manila airport and past security in order to catch the flight to Melbourne.
The Australian rental car fiasco – It was a pain in the ass, but it all worked out ok in the end
That special night in Beijing – The one Jamie has forbidden me to talk and/or blog about. Horrible as it was, it makes me laugh out loud every time I think about it. And if she were being honest, she’d have to admit that it makes her laugh, too. (Mysterious, huh?)

Hard to believe, isn’t it? 185 perfect days interrupted by a few minor inconveniences. You know it’s been a great trip when spending the day in Honolulu is the worst memory you can come up with.

New York’s Central Park may be more famous, but Sydney’s Botanical Garden has to be the world’s most spectacular urban park. It runs right along the edge of the magnificent Sydney Harbour and overlooks the city’s twin icons — the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.

We were walking from Woolloomooroo Wharf to the Opera House last night when we stumbled upon a grandstand filled with a thousand or so people way over on the eastern edge of the Garden. They were there to see an outdoor movie on a giant screen that had been erected at the edge of the water for the summer.

Since we’d already been to outdoor movies in Broome and in the Barossa Valley, we decided to come to a movie the following evening, our last night in Australia and the last night of this six month odyssey.

It was a warm, perfect summer evening. The movie was The Book Thief, but the setting made it difficult to keep our eyes on the screen. The Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge sat across the shimmering waters of the harbour to the right of the screen, the city’s glowing skyline to the left. The moon began rising over the Opera House just after the movie began.

When the movie ended, Jamie and I had tears in our eyes. But it had a lot more to do with the end of this trip than with the end of the movie.

Remember back at the beginning of our trip when we didn’t climb Norway’s Pulpit Rock because of Jamie’s leg injury? Well, we’ve now added a bookend to this end of the trip by not climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

We say we’re going to make the climb every time we visit Sydney, but find reasons not to. Our friend Traci did it a few years ago and raved about the experience.

Unfortunately, the climb encompasses 1493 very steep steps. Jamie’s leg has been acting up because of all the walking we’ve been doing and she decided that it would be stupid to risk a serious injury with one day left on our six month trip.

I’m terrified of heights. So what I said was, “Oh, that’s too bad. I’d really like to climb it, but I couldn’t possibly do it without you.” But what I meant was, “Whew! Dodged that bullet.”

Look closely at the second photo in this post and you’ll spot one group of people climbing the top level of the bridge (top center of the photo) and another group on the lower level (lower right side of photo).

“Hey, Jamie, let’s have another cup of coffee down at the Opera House and watch the uninjured brave people climb the bridge.”

It’s impossible, absolutely impossible, for us to describe how much we’ll miss Australia and the Aussies. Here are a couple videos that make us tear up every time we see ’em. One’s old and one’s brand new.

“I Still Call Australia Home” was written by Aussie composer Peter Allen and brought to life in this gorgeous Qantas Airlines commercial that features an Aussie kids’ choir in locations around Australia and the world. They used to run a longer version on all international flights bound for Australia, but Jamie refused to watch it because it made her cry. I can’t find it on YouTube, but you’ll get the idea from this shorter version.

This is a new Australian Tourism commercial called “It’s Like Love”. They ran it prior to last night’s movie in the Botanical Garden. We were both in tears again.

What a couple of softies.

We may be forced to buy a larger house in Texas just to store all the pixels Jamie’s accumulated by taking photos of the Sydney Opera House.

When I first met her she told me that her life’s dream was to visit this iconic building. Very few people ever accomplish their dreams more thoroughly than she has.

She’s taken photos of it from every conceivable angle at every conceivable time of day in every conceivable weather condition in every conceivable season. When we get up in the morning in Sydney I always say, “What do you want to do today?”, knowing full well that her reflexive answer will be, “Let’s go down to the Opera House and get a cup of coffee.”

I was lucky enough to capture this photo of Jamie capturing her 1,000,000th photo of the same building. Yes, it’s a lousy photo, but this is history, man.

Harry’s Cafe de Wheels, our favorite restaurant in the world, is famous for its pies. It’s been selling them for 70 years from this roadside trailer just down the street from the Woolloomooloo Wharf.

An American pie is fruity, flaky and sweet. An Australian pie is an entirely different concoction. Instead of being filled with sweet apple or cherry goodness, an Aussie pie is filled with meat (usually beef, but sometimes chicken) and covered with layers of mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. It’s a heart attack on a plate.

They’re not for everyone (our friend Traci damn near gagged when she tried one), but the first thing Jamie and I do when we get to Sydney is head to Harry’s.

2800 kilometers or 1740 miles. That’s how far we have to drive to get from Adelaide, South Australia to Perth, Western Australia in order to avoid paying a $4200 one-way drop-off fee to our rental car company.

Those are 2800 very long, incredibly flat, remarkably empty kilometers, occasionally punctuated by a petrol stop, drab roadhouses with odd names like Cocklebiddy and Balladonia, and not much else.

It took three days and the only saving grace was dinner with the Langer sisters and their husbands in Koolgardie.

One of Jamie’s biggest disappointments (possibly her only disappointment) on this trip is that we haven’t seen a single kookaburra. She loves to hear them laugh, especially when they wake us up early in the morning with their raucous cackling.

We went to Sydney’s Taronga Zoo yesterday and what do we see — sitting in a tree, not in a cage — but a kookaburra.

If you’ve never heard a kookaburra laugh, here’s a video. Makes us smile every time we hear this sound.

I did an earlier post called Land of the Giants that talked about the odd Aussie habit of building “big” things along the side of the highway. We saw one of my favorites the other day.

Halfway across Australia, just 20 meters off the main highway in the almost non-existant town of Kimba, South Australia, sits The Big Galah. As you can probably tell, a galah is a bird — a big pink and grey cockatoo that’s also known as the rose-breasted cockatoo. It’s one of the most common and widespread birds in Australia and can be found almost everywhere in the country.

Galahs are notoriously (and accurately) known as stupid birds. In fact, the phrase “dumb as a galah” is common Aussie slang.

As we drove to the gym early one morning we saw a group of galahs land on some telephone wires. All but one of them landed atop the wires and perched as you see hundreds of birds do every day of the week. But one of them lost its grip as it landed and swung upside down on the wire. Instead of letting go and making another approach, this galah just hung upside down on the wire.

Here’s a photo of a galah we spotted sitting alongside the road several mornings in a row. He was standing right at the edge of the road so we decided to stop and scare him away so he wouldn’t get run over. Jamie climbed out of the car and attempted to chase him off, but he just squawked at her, stood his ground and refused to move.

So we took a photo of him instead.