When returning from holiday, one starts to think of holidays

[fivemack]

By 'south of the Rio Grande', I mean 'into Mexico' rather than 'anywhere south of 31N' - I thought this was standard usage, but various of my friends in Cambridge interpreted it the other way.

[Poll #1545665]

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Assuming Australia is a continent this week (or is at least part of one that I haven't otherwise been on).

I'm pretty well-traveled for an American, anyway. Haven't been to South America or the Far East, or Antarctica.

Keeping track of the exact European countries I've visited is even harder than keeping track of the states, since it's all long ago (1967 and earlier, except for England).

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I usually figure there's an Australasian continent composed of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and various islands.

(PNG but not Indonesia because there's a massive sea trench between them, whereas the Torres Strait is so shallow that there used to be an Oz-PNG land bridge.)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

If you're lowering sea level, I think you get an extra continent of Zealandia before you get a dry path from Oslo to Sydney; it looks from the Google bathymetry, though I wish it had numbers on, that there's no path from Australia to New Zealand without crossing water deeper than any you'd encounter going Singapore - Borneo - bottom of Sulawesi - Maluku islands - western Irian Jaya.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I've been to Australia and New Zealand (work trip back in the 1980s), so the count I put in the poll is correct at least by your definition.

(I'm pretty sure Australia was an island when I was in gradeschool. I'm absolutely sure that I bought a photo book called Australia: The Biggest Island while I was there, since I still have it.)

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Australia: The Biggest Island

Rather unfair to Tasmania et al, that. Although I suppose The Australian Mainland: The Biggest Island doesn't really scan.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

It's a continent in Jules Verne's 1867 In Search of Castaways/Children of Captain Grant.

No controversy is mentioned on the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_%28continent%29), though "the island continent" is included as a literary synonym.

Conventionally, Australia the continent includes Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. New Zealand's got its own submerged continent, Zealandia, but they can be bundled together as Australasia.

Of course, I grew up in USSR thinking of Iceland as part of Europe and Jamaica as part of North America, so all these definitions are pretty wobbly.