My best plans are accidental. Dripping with serendipity. And this is happening again first week of December.

It was with boundless excitement on visiting Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach I found myself on offer of a trip to Melbourne to do a keynote for her Powerful Learning Practice culminating event for their project there.

That is one day I am down for, November 29… but while planning travel, it only made sense to take in more than Melbourne, so I opted for a 2 week stay. While I visited every capitol city in my 2007 whirlwind trip I hardly saw anything beyond airports and hotels (plus I got sick my first weekend on the ground). So I wanted to see some more out of the cities.

So the plan first is a few days of road tripping with my colleague Jan Whitaker, who I knew from Maricopa in the late 1980s and I had visited in 2000 (she moved there after doing a sabbatical), She has offered a driving trip to see the Great Ocean Road. I will then return to Melbourne and get to hang out with my ds106 co-conspirator, Rowan Peter.

It was a challenge to not over plan the time there, and while I know people in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, I opted for Tasmania- which I only saw so briefly in 2007. I wanted to visit Jo Murray again, and a colleague I got to know through NMC, Angela Thomas, who has gotten a teaching position at the University of Tasmania.

So that would be the second leg, a week in Tasmania.

I’d let the details fill in once I booked a round trip to Hobart from Melbourne.

But then… I found out from Frankie, my contact who would be hosting me in Hobart, that Nancy White would be in Hobart the same time. Awesome! There is nothing more fun than hanging out with Nancy.

As they say on those Ronco commercials… But wait, there’s more! Now I found out at the same time I am in Hobart, they are hosting the ASCILITE11 conference is going on the same week! Now I will get to meet up with friends Mark Northover, Stephen Harlow, Brad beach, and likely Richard Elliot, and more.

What an awesome convergence, I could not have planned it better.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by M J M

modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin

This trip is with my NMC colleagues Larry Johnson and Rachel Smith as we go first to Melbourne to launch a new flavor of the NMC’s Horizon Project, working with a new advisory board of Australian and New Zealand educators on Horizon.au,. Out of this effort, we are producing later this year a Horizon Report specifically focused on emerging technology relevant to education in this region.

We are also going to Brisbane and Sydney, visiting in all, the 5 NMC member organizations in Australia: RMIT, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, University of Woolongong, and University of New South Wales. There might be an intermission in all this to check out the big reef. And I’m looking forward to a beach walk and dinner meet up with a group of colleagues in Sydney, thanks to the choreographing of Angela Thomas for dinner and Sean Fitzgerald for the walk (i understand he has a blog ;-) They keep saying how “freezing cold” it is there, yet the temps don’t look that scary. Heck, I had almost snow in Arizona in summer yesterday.

So expect the 366 photo stream to shift from Arizona flowers and dogs to assorted who knows what I will see in Australia.

And so far, I am avoiding trying to toss out any cute Australian phrases. I’ve been told my attempts are lame ;-) I am certainly going to link to this video as an example of learning, instead relying on more trusted sources.

Okay, I am really excited about this trip! It took some restraint not to pack a month ago. We’ll be there July 5-20, and the blog and flickr light shall be lit.

And hopefully no one there will call me a drongo.