I Traveled To Australia Just To Cross Flushing A Toilet Off My Bucket List

Who really knows why the first humans were motivated to travel. I would imagine food and water were probably the big motivators but that's taking things a little too far back in time. Let's begin this story about one year ago. My location at that time, give or take a few days was Sydney Australia. My wife and I had gone there to celebrate her turning a certain age.

Okay, to be truthful that's what I told people we were going for. I even let my wife believe that this major milestone birthday was the reason for our journey to the other side of the world. That was not totally the truth. While I did want my wife to have a special birthday memory. I was a man on a mission in Australia and New Zealand.

My mission had to do with flushing the toilet. All my life I had heard that toilets flushed south of the equator drain  in the opposite direction of toilets flushed in the northern hemisphere. After a 22 hour plane ride we finally arrived at our hotel. Instead of falling directly into bed to sleep in a horizontal position I took my trusty telephone into the bathroom, turned on the camera, and flushed.

As a student of atmospheric fluid models and physics and old wives tales I have to say I was totally bummed out. The Coriolis Effect I had heard so much about had absolutely no impact on the direction of the flush. The water swirled in a counter clockwise fashion. Just as the water swirled in my own Louisiana based bathroom fixture.

I could have let this discovery totally ruin my trip but the scientist in me made sure I noted the directional flow of every toilet that I used on the trip. To be honest the hardest part of the whole adventure was having to explain to my wife why I had very few pictures of her birthday dinner but over seventy short videos of various toilets flushing.

She hadn't been that upset at me since I used the tape of our wedding to record the Daytona 500 that year that Dale Earnhardt finally won it. I guess after 28 years of marriage she has pretty much decided I am too dangerous to be allowed to be set free or she has just totally given up on me and only keeps me around because I can roll the garbage can out to the street.