Last day in Wilmington

For my last leg of Wilmington I checked in the Baymont Hotel with a bunch of other festival stragglers and organisers. Since it was opposite the hotel and me being an Aussie, we thought it rather funny to go to the ‘Outback Steakhouse’. Honestly, there was nothing in the restaurant (food-wise or ambience-wise) that I could connect to Australia - but they had good steak and you could compare it to something like our ‘Hogsbreath Cafe’.

I finally slept, even though I was still exhausted when I woke up the next day, but I felt revived and like I could continue on to the last part of my journey.

Festival co-director/organiser Peter Effaldana took me to the airport, danced together with butterfly wings and shared secrets on hair-products.... Yes - hair products. As you can see in my photos - Peter has quite an amazing head of hair, and women literally stop him in the streets and ask him if they can touch it. Peter claims this amazing hair is the result of washing with a special type of shampoo called “Aussie”. When I told him I’d never heard of it, he seemed shocked. I think it’s like my experiences with Fosters beer during my adventures, read my Kansas City posts for more info on that... :-)

The rest of the day I spent travelling again. Two airplanes and a stop over in Atlanta, finally got me into the land of the Twin Cities - Minneapolis.

As I’d mentioned in the previous post - I had spent all night on the phone and internet to my travel agent and legend Mick Tattam of STA Travel, in Australia - who had helped me change my plans for my last week in America. I was supposed to spend my last week on the glorious beaches of Miami, Florida and meet my puppet mentor Paul Louis. However, I’d been invited to take part of film shoot as a puppet extra in a feature puppet film from the cult internet puppet tv show, Transylvania Television.

This was not an opportunity to be missed, however it was a tough decision - especially since I was really looking forward to meeting Paul Louis. But my mind was convinced knowing that I would see Jeff and Kathy again - who lived in Minneapolis and who I formed really close connections with at my time during PuppetFest Midwest.


So off I went, what felt like a kind of crazy whim - but how crazy could this adventure get, honestly? I went to the other side of the world in search of puppetry, what was a couple extra plane rides more?