Feel the fear and pack a sword...

In fifteen hours I will be boarding a plane with most of my immediate family and traveling literally half way across the world to a place which holds fifty percent of the worlds poisonous species... And I'm getting a little nervous...

It's not just that I'm leaving my husband behind and ever since we've been together, the only times we've been apart for extended periods of time have been for soul crushing, sad reasons, which subconsciously lends this separation some confusing emotions... And that very, very recently we've had to survive just that kind of a separation, which makes me feel guilty about leaving him on his own, with only our mardy cat for company...

It's not just the twenty-two hour flight, which has me jumping forward in time, turning a day's journey into something more like two and (I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but what the hell!) will be my first flight... Visions of hitting some weird magnetic storm, the plane being ripped in two and crash landing on an island with polar bears, sentient black smoke and a less than fulfilling plot outcome are popping into my head from time to time...

Shudder...

It's not just the fact that there are spiders large enough to eat birds in Australia and tiny ones with enough venom in one bite to kill about three people, crocodiles that can leap from the water and snap you up in the blink of an eye, dragging you under never to be seen again...

Mmmmm, Nix...

It's not just that book prices are astronomical due to import and travel costs and weight restrictions mean that even if I found something wonderful like an Australian edition of Sabriel by Garth Nix in HB to complete my set (although the UK covers were simply beautiful, the Australian editions had truly stunning fantasy painted covers and were published about a year ahead of the UK - this was great when you read a proof of Sabriel and had to read the rest of the series as soon as possible...) there might not actually be room in my bag for it unless I wanted to pay a luggage surcharge...

And it's not just the fact that just as I'm going they're starting to show two episodes of Supernatural a week in the UK... Universe, that just seems petty...

It's not just these things, it's also the fear.

The fear of the new. The fear of the unknown. (The fear of the potentially poisonous spider that could be hiding beneath the loo seat...)

But then at 5:30 this morning, when the mardy cat woke me up wanting company and/or biscuits and I realised, hey - losing sleep now might mean sleeping better on the plane tonight and not noticing the turbulence/chunky guy with curly hair/pretty petite brunette in handcuffs/shambling drunk English rock musician/hobbit hiding in the toilet as the plane goes down...

At 5:30 this morning I realised I'll probably only do an Australian trip the once... This might be the only time I get to experience two Spring Equinoxes in the same year... There will be things I see in Australia that I will never see anywhere else in the world and thankfully the spiders will be some of those things.

At 5:30 this morning I realised that I am going on a really big adventure. A really BIG adventure.

And at 7:15 I realised I used repetition too much, but that is a far smaller adventure that we can discuss another time. ANOTHER TIME, okay...

So... Yeah. Wow. Big adventure time.

I just hope I can find me a talking, morphing dog, a rainbow unicorn and a whole village made of sweet and dessert people. A magical sword could come in handy too. :)