Every living human being on earth outside of America uses the metric system, so right from the first day of our trip in Canada we were pulled into the world of liters and meters. We picked these up quickly. After all, we had already experienced the pain of running a 10k, so we knew how to judge kilometers, and I'd been to the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, so I knew my way around a liter.

Temperature is harder, though. It is so subjective and tied to so many other factors that you can only come to know it by sweating your way to an understanding. Tell me it's 92 degree Fahrenheit on a Minnesota August morning, and I can already feel the sweat pooling the crick of my back. But tell me it's 29 degrees Celsius and I can do all the nine-fifths-plus-32 I want and it doesn't do any good. I never got it. Until now.

We put about 40 liters of gas into our car and headed north, away from the ocean. The land was flat and dry. All the hay fields were dusty yellow. This was a part of Australia settled by German Lutherans, and as we drove through clean tidy little farming town after clean tidy little farming town it would have been easy to mistake them for the American Midwest. The farmhouses all looked solid and well-tended. Their lawn ornament displays were small enough not to distract from the pretty gardens and nicely cut grass.

Every town in Australia has two things. First, prominently displayed in the town square or somewhere along Main Street is a large war memorial. Usually it shows a solider in WWI attire, and then lists the names of the townspeople killed in both world wars. I shocked to see the long list of names in even the smallest of towns. The subject of the wars comes up frequently when talking with Australians. They feel passionately about their involvement, especially about World War I and the debacle at Gallipoli. Even young kids quote figures about the number of casualties.

The second thing that every town in Australia has is an information booth. Actually, information mansion is more accurate. The size of these booths is hugely disproportionate to the size of the town, and inside one always finds a library full of free maps and pamphlets and a smiling, helpful, slightly aged lady who showers affection and advice upon all who enter.

Sarah and I were nearing the Grampians National Park, our home for the next three days, so we stopped at the information booth in a small town just outside the southern border of the park. It was a really, really small town. One mini-mart, one takeout food place, one real estate office, a public pool, and a few houses. And, oh yeah, staring each other down across Main Street, a war memorial and an information booth so big it dwarfed the mini-mart and the food place put together.

Inside we found a library of free maps and pamphlets and not one but two smiling, helpful, slightly aged ladies who showered advice and affection upon us. One of the ladies, the one behind the desk, was the official lady, but the other, the one holding her keys and looking like she was about to go, was the talker. I got the feeling she hung out here a lot, kind of hoping people like us would drift in, and although she keeps saying, "You know I really have to be going" she never actually leaves. Within seconds we had learned that she had been to 41 countries. China was next on her list, and she had just returned from Antarctica. And if you go to Antarctica be sure to get on a small boat because if you get on a big boat. . .

We stumbled back to our car under the weight of all our free literature. The steering wheel was hot to the touch. I'd say the temperature was a good 20 or 30 something-er-other Celsius.

The Grampians is a geological oddity that rise straight up out of the flat plains about 3 hours west of Melbourne. They are a small mountain range, but they look vastly different from any mountain range I've ever seen. It looks like someone took a jack, wedged it down under the earth, and then tilted big, 20-mile long granite plates up at an angle. The mountains looked less like mountains and more like a series of really big ramps. The long sloping side of each ramp was covered in trees, and at the end, each of the ramps ended in a dramatic dropp-off. Along the way, the landscape was interrupted with lakes, waterfalls, canyons, and cliffs.

Heading north, the first mountain we came to was Mt. Abrupt, and that pretty well describes it. It wasn't a big mountain by American standards, maybe 1500 feet, but it rose suddenly from the plains without any buffering foothills. We entered the park and drove along a long valley. On our left were the cliff faces of one ridge of mountains, and on our right the long stone covered slopes of another. We passed a reservoir and then arrived at a small cluster of shops. Halls Gap.

We were staying at a brand new hostel, the "eco-hostel" that had just been built with government funds. It was a stylish place in an outdoorsy way, similar in design to the new REI stores. It had huge kitchen, big sitting areas, a chicken coop with fresh eggs each morning, and a gas grill. It also had a digital thermometer that told me the temperature outside was 41 degrees! I didn't really know what 41 degrees meant until we did our laundry, and when we hung the clothes out to dry the first shirt we hung up was dry by the time we hung the last. No kidding.

The next morning we got up at 6 AM to beat the heat and did a four hour hike up out of our valley to some viewpoints above. There are so many unfamiliar things about hiking in Australia. The plants and trees are different. The birds and animals and insects are different. But what struck us this morning on our hike up the mountain was how loud they all were. The birds chirp and caw and whistle. One of the most famous, the cuckaburra, makes a long drawn out laugh sound that is unmistakable.

By the time we returned from our hike it was 42 degrees, too hot to do anything but sit as still as possible. At 6:00, when we thought it might have cooled down enough to go out, we went to the community pool, but even frequent dips into the water couldn't fight back the heat.

The Grampians is sort of like a big summer camp for adults. All over Halls Gap, flyers list activities and adventures to be undertaken. Sarah and I booked ourselves on a rock climbing and abseiling course, something neither of us had tried before.

We met our instructor, Ian, up at the car park near the cliffs at the top of the valley. He was with our classmate, a nice teenage kid whose family stood a respectful distance away videotaping every move we made all day. Ian outfitted us with harnesses and helmets, taught us a few essential knots, and then loaded us with gear and ropes for the short hike to our first cliff. We started on a fairly simple 19 meter pitch. We climbed up (roped for safety) and then abseiled down. Abseiling (rappelling) was definitely a rush. Just like in the movies, you fly down the cliff, bouncing off the face with your feet, letting the rope fly through your hands. The first step is the hardest. It isn't a natural instinct to stand backwards on a cliff with your heels hanging off in thin air, and then leaning back. For our big payoff, we moved to a 40 meter cliff (about 130 feet) and abseiled down that at the end of the day. Loads of fun and something we both hope to do again.

Summer camp always ends far too soon, and time came yesterday for us to move on. We were headed further west to the Barossa Valley, Australia's wine country. We crossed the state border, leaving Victoria for South Australia, and drove towards Adelaide. South Australia claims to be the "driest state in the driest country in the driest continent" on earth, and from what we saw I don't think they were stretching the truth. For hours we drove through hot yellow fields of crispy hay or straw, baking in the sun. Occasionally we passed a herd of cows, clustered tightly in the shade under a lone scrappy tree. Looking at those cows, we thought of one thing: I hope we have air-conditioning tonight.

Just before Adelaide, we angled north and passed, there on the side of our small back-road, one of the wackiest sights Australia has to offer. In 1850 a young German immigrant, Herr Herbig, landed at the Port of Adelaide. He made his way inland, settling with his fellow Germans in the hills to the west, and took up farming. He met a young fraulein, married, and had two kids. None of this is unusual. It's a story repeated thousands of times in Australia and America.

What is unusual is that when Herr Herbig and the missus shacked up, they didn't shack up in a house. Or even in a shack. They shacked up in a tree. And they didn't even build a cozy little treehouse with a macrame rope ladder, they just lived in the dirt under the roots. The tree is still there today and you can walk right in. The roots form a sort of teepee, but there was certainly nothing warm and comforting about the place, nothing that would make me want to bunk down with meine Frau and raise two kids. The four of them lived there for 5 years.

From The Tree it was a short hop over to Nooriopta in the Barossa Valley. We had booked what the lady on the phone called her "cottage," but at the price we were paying cottage didn't necessarily infer lace doilies and flower pots and such. More likely, it would be a tent, or a converted outhouse. But it turned out to be a lovely old stone building set amidst the vineyards. For the first time in weeks we had our own bathroom, a big sitting area, a TV, a kitchen. There was a shaded patio out front, and a small swimming pool in pretty garden next door.

"Does it have. . .?" I didn't even have to finish the question and she was shaking her head. No A/C.

"Gonna be a hot one tonight!" She replied, a little to cheerfully. Then, as a kicker, she informed us that the forecast called for no cooling during the night, and a hotter day tomorrow.

We had one measly little fan in the room, but the only power outlet was in the exact opposite corner of the cottage, 30 feet from our bed. Within an hour we had given up trying to sleep in the still air of the bed, and we spend the rest of the night spread-eagled on the floor in front of the fan. Spending the next day biking to wineries under a hot sun didn't sound too great.