There are many rite of passage traditions we observe, give meaning to and feel some strong emotive connection with. Today our daughter and her partner boarded a plane for Europe, a trip the two of them had planned for more than a year.

Funny how I never imagined how important this would be to me until those moments just before she went through security and disppeared from view and from our lives for the next five weeks.

Sure she has been making decisions and taking control of her own life for some time now but today made her independence more real to me than ever before.

This image from my own recent travels is a window shot of Doha as I head back to Adelaide:

… we are looking forward to hers when she comes home