19th December – Meet Gary & Lyn in Belmont and their son David and partner Theresa at Sydney Airport

Well the journey begins for Julie and I, 10 am and the start of a 30+ hour journey to Milan, Italy. 

Us leaving home

Lyn & Gary...Lyn happy to see the shops

Our first connection is with Gary and Lyn who we are driving with to Sydney airport. Gary is my first cousin and one of my closest relatives in many senses. We are close in age, just two months apart. We have not lived more than a few kilometres apart for nearly 50 years from high school, to coming to Newcastle to work for ‘the big Australian BHP’. We both married school teachers, which sentenced us to a lifetime of holidays squeezed into school breaks, this holiday included. Our children who are now spread afar from London, Perth, Melbourne, Canberra are also interweaved in ages are joining us with their partners in Ortesei in the Italian Dolomites for our first family white Christmas.

David and Theresa at airport control.
Snuck this in before airport police shut me
down for taking photos. The're a sensitive mob.
Recall an incident at Heathrow where an
unfortunate fellow was caught taking a
photo. You would have thought he had
brought out a machine gun as staff pointed him out
and the airport police sprung into action

Our next connection is with Gary and Lyn’s eldest son David and his girlfriend Theresa, both from Canberra, but joining us on the flights to Milan. We have an interesting connection between David and Milan. On Julie and my very first trip to Milan to visit Gary’s sister who was living in Milan with her Italian husband Giovanni we had a call from Gary to inform us of the birth of his first child, David…nearly 32 years ago now! Theresa was born in mainland China and a bit of a novelty for this 4^th generation Australian-Chinese family. In my parents age it was virtually forbidden to marry non-Chinese. Gary’s mother was ¼ Irish and even that was frowned on! Since then though, the succeeding generations have partnered with non-Chinese (though we have recently found out that my blue-eyed blonde wife was 1/16^th Chinese blood….and that another story. I’ve been telling her that I suspected something after her love for yum cha at first sight J

Social Network Update

As we move through our journey I will be publishing an updated social network map of the people and places we visit. Generally any new connections are attributed to the one who instigated the connection. There is a colour code for the relationship liks to reflect family, firends, acquaintences. The places are marked as red.

So day 1's map looks like:

Watch the network grow over time. The idea is to take a people and connections lens to our trip diary. I hope you find it interesting!