If you have the cool program Google Earth installed on your computer (and a good broadband Internet connection), you can travel along with us and actually locate where in the world we've been!

You'll be surprised at how many of the trip's locales have been imaged in high resolution.

As we describe our pictures on the following pages, just click the Google Earth link icons we've sprinkled throughout the text, to download a placemark to your Google Earth program. (Like all downloaded Placemarks, they will appear in your Temporary Places folder.) The globe will rotate and zoom in to that location. You can then fly around the area to check it out from different angles and heights. This works best on computers with dual monitors; put your browser on one monitor, and Google Earth on the other beside it. (Using Tools > Options > General tab, check "Show web results in external browser".) But even if you have only a single monitor, try it anyway!

Even better, you can download our whole trip in one placemark.kmz folder and step through the tour on your own. Then, when you come across a Google Earth link on our Web page, just locate the referred-to Placemark in our tour folder, and select it. This has other advantages:

   * We've included some "mini-tours" — fly-arounds of some specific sites &mdash in gray sub-folders. You can see a global overview of all the points of interest contained in that folder by double-clicking on it. Hitting the "Play" button with a folder selected will give you the tour. We've also divided the entire trip into daily folders, so you can play tours of selected days, too.

   * You'll also find some additional links, points of interest, and stops along the way that we didn't include in the text of these Web pages.

   * Of course, you can play the entire tour from start to finish by selecting the top level folder and clicking the "Play" button; you'll bounce and fly from place to place, condensing our three-week trip into just a few minutes.

For Google Earth settings, we recommend enabling the Layers for Terrain, Populated Places and 3D Buildings, and unchecking just about everything else. There aren't too many official Australian placemarks in the program's datasets; however, there are plenty of Google Earth Community markers to Live Webcams and VR panoramas for quite a few parts of Australia. See Mount Stromlo as just one example. We have our Tour Pause time set to 2.5, and (under Advanced) the Fly-to and Tour Speeds set to 0.25. Your computer's mileage may vary.

We hope you enjoy this cyber-tour add-on. Let us know how it worked for you!