Where the Inner West meets the World

It might be at the check-in desk as people in foreign uniforms ask for passports.
It might be at the departure gate where a range of accents and languages flutter through the air.
It might be at the point on the runway when aircraft wheels lift off the Sydney tarmac.


Any of these places could be the arbitrary mark where Sydney ends and the rest of the world begins.


Somewhere between your house/job/routine and a foreign place/new activity/crazy event an adventure begins. Maybe it happens slowly as the organisation and planning steadily transform into live action. Perhaps there is a sudden moment when you are definitely not at home anymore. At some point though you’re no longer thinking about being out there, and you’re actually there doing it.


For me that place is a bizarre street corner on the drive from the Inner West to the international airport that says ‘things are about to get strange’. It happens on the drive, right when the Airport signs are large and insistent. The roads are no longer the small local ones near your house, but mighty multi-lane arteries. As the sound of descending planes can be heard over the high momentum trucking, Google Maps, Cab drivers and local convention tells you to make a sharp left turn into a street so tiny it doesn’t even warrant a centre lane marking. It is ludicrous, brief and eccentric as heck before you turn back onto another superhighway sweep of concrete. It reminds me that I’m still in the fiddly Inner West of Sydney but that I won't be for long. 2 mins later the car will pull up at an enormous terminal because a journey has begun. It’s my moment of adventure clarity.


For those people out there on adventure right now I say, be brave, have fun, be in it, and come home with a medal.