Travelling and teaching around the world, one pin at a time. Tap a pin to see where, when, and what happened there. Pins with a glow have a little story.
At the lodge she kept having visions of a huge male lion staring in at her from out the back by the tub. She later learned it had really happened to a guest who stayed in the same room she was in. On her last morning drive, the tracker found “Ungala” tracks, and then the lions themselves: a pride lying very “Lalapanzi”, relaxed and quiet, some of them sleeping.
Standing in the chapel before a sculpture of Archangel Michael, she asked why she couldn't feel him. Seconds later she was so overcome with love that she cried.
Meditating before a statue of Kwan Yin she was given half of a character, and upstairs among 10,000 Buddhas, the other half. The Master recognised it as the ancient Tibetan character for “million.”
Arrived to Stonehenge in time for it to snow as her watch stopped as it started to snow. Still has no idea what it means ... meanwhile she finds out an internet friend of hers dies that day. Maybe that is why the watch stopped?
Over 120 people filled an 18th-century church. The lights flickered and her microphone cut in and out, with no storm outside. Afterwards a client said she had seen the colours of Archangels Uriel, Raphael and Michael around her.
Coming back from a tour in the long boat, she very clearly “saw” eight Japanese soldiers in uniform come out onto the beach. It was so quick it surprised her: resident energy from the past. At Hellfire Pass she was too emotional to get much, but felt a tremendous amount of pain coming from the place.
In October 2006 the room at the United Nations in Vienna was packed, standing room only. She lectured about angels, then sat down and channeled them. They spoke about world events (she doesn’t remember what) and then took questions. She had first lectured there in 2005.
In July 2005 she was fully booked with readings, most of them translated into Swiss German by a friend. At a channel night, the angels talked about terrorist attacks in London and Germany. Four days later, on July 7, London was bombed.
She picked up many things, most notably prisoners wore hoods outside their cells and no talking was allowed. Controlled rage, a shiv and stabbing the doctor - an Irishman had planned it well in advance. Inside she was very cold on her right side, then warmer once outside, which means many spirits were present. The guide in charge who had been there 20 years was surprised. They don’t tell people this, but an Irishman had stabbed the doctor. “Where did you read it?” Liz just shrugged - she picked up on it, saying it was very clear.
Inside the old church at Hierapolis, the “Cotton Castle,” she saw clearly a priest in dark maroon robes. He was worried about a book with a bunch of names in it that couldn’t get into the wrong hands, so he buried it to the right of the altar.
Working in Surfers Paradise in late April 2004, Guidance first spoke to her about her father. It is part of her story, in “My Dad.”
Two dogs were snarling and fighting each other, and her friend, who was terrified of dogs, stood behind her with both hands on her shoulders. She stepped in front and stayed calm, and Guidance had her send out massive amounts of love. The snarling dogs stopped, came and licked her knee, and ran off.
At dinner, Liz watched a kitten be attacked by an adult dog and left to die. She asked restaurant staff for a box, gathered some napkins, collected the kitten and set off in search of a vet. Her friend was annoyed but she drove the rental car while Liz held the badly injured kitten. Liz had to leave the kitten to park the car and the cat was terrified. The kitten would not leave Liz. She worked with the Angels, sending healing energy and tried to take the pain away, finally asking the angels to take the poor soul home. It was time. The kitten died in her arms, but she felt good because that kitten had so much love and was not alone when it passed.
At St Catherine’s Monastery she saw the burning bush, still alive: the same plant, green all year round.
In the Roman theatre at Aspendos she saw two visions. One was a middle-aged man with a receding hairline, reading from a scroll to a crowd. Earlier, at Perge, she had heard children playing and seen a dark-haired child running after a ball.
She had wanted for years to meditate inside a fresh crop circle. This one, shaped like “OM,” was less than 48 hours old. The energy was subtle at first, then a light vibration against her skin. The message she received: to connect, so we can all grow together.
When a bone of Buddha’s finger was brought to Hong Kong, she queued with hundreds. With monks chanting, she stepped onto the gold-and-red stage and felt so much love her eyes welled up.
On the outer reef, a baby shark about four feet long swam straight at her mask and looked her in the eye. “He played with me,” and it helped her get over her shark fears.
Three of them took the dinghy to an island. She saw a cloud coming over the mountain and knew they had to get back to the boat ASAP. “The squall hits us and within seconds we are drenched and the waves are coming up over the dingy… the rain felt like needles coming down.” She says she could have been really frightened, “but decided not to be and to make it a challenge.” She made it feel like a thrill, timed the swing of the boat, and slammed sideways into the stern “as if I had done this a million times.” “Bloody hell we made it!”
She welcomed the Millennium at Sydney Harbour with 1.5 million other people, and her jaw dropped at the fireworks off the bridge.
“One year when I was in Australia I stayed with a friend whose house was right up against a bird sanctuary, somewhere sort of north in Sydney. The birds were so noisy in the morning. It was crazy how early I had to get up because of the birds.”
“I was staying with family friends we’d known for years. My parents met them while traveling. They gave me my own room in their home every time I came to Australia, so I got to use their home as a base. One day I was in the office. No one was home but me and I felt like I was being watched. It was a very weird feeling, so I turned around and looked and didn’t see anyone or anything. I went back to typing and heard a rustling sound like something in paper. I turned around and there was a huge two-and-a-half-foot-long iguana in the house. He had come into the office, first stared at me, and then got in the paper. Getting him out of the house was something else, and I was by myself.”
She has a special pull to Kaikoura: one year she swam with dolphins, and the time before she went whale watching. She was told to sing to the dolphins and they would come around her, so she sang the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and they swirled around her, playing.
On the Sacred England tour, on the first morning the famous Mists of Avalon settled in the early light of the valley below the Tor.
After a week on the barge La Litote through 64 locks, her first ever hot-air balloon ride: “a fantastic experience.”
Walking a beach with a friend and her German Shepherd, Prince, they climbed a sandy cut with high banks. Young cows with little horns stared down from three meters above on each side. Prince crouched low on his feet, making himself small, still and quiet, and her friend froze, while Liz stepped in cow poo and backed up to get it off her shoe. The cows got rowdy, and Liz mentally threw energy at them like hot water. They reacted at once and backed up as if smacked. Her friend said, “Oh my God Liz, what did you just do?” A few years later her friend came to visit at her mom’s in Sequim and they retold the story; her friend confirmed that was exactly how it happened.
After a very long drive from Wellington down to Dunedin, she was exhausted and answering emails on her laptop at a desk in the guest room of her friend’s home, with water on about three sides of it. She felt someone in the room and turned: a ghost stood at the foot of the bed. She wasn’t surprised. In earlier readings for her friend she had learned that a ghost lived there who wouldn’t let them hang pictures or put nails in the walls unless they asked him first. He looked at her as if to say “you don’t belong here.” She told him her friend had asked her to stay, that she was exhausted, and that she just didn’t want to deal with it right now. And he went away.
On the long drive north, hot and tired, she stopped early and took a motel room in Townsville. Noting the ceiling fan was low, she took her shirt off to cool down, only to have her finger get THWACKED by the blades of the fan. Loudly she exclaims “I love you I’m so sorry” - they weren’t her words. At the time she didn’t understand why they did that. The next morning, leaving town, a cloud in the sky looked exactly like her hurt hand and finger in the same position. She wishes she had taken a picture. In Cairns she had surgery, and had to keep the finger out of the water for a few weeks, which kept her off the dive trip she had booked.
Safari days start very early: you come back, eat, nap, and go out again at night. At Leopard Hills, a luxurious air-conditioned lodge on a hill above a valley, she was napping in bed when she heard a funny noise like arguing or talking, but not human. She slowly opened her eyes. About thirty small monkeys were looking in at her through the window, hands on the glass, and she felt like the one in the cage. She loved it: it was funny and extremely interesting. She tried to grab her camera, but the moment she moved, they all ran off.
Her ear was much better after the first day and fine by day three. Her room, tent number three, had brick walls with a tent roof, so it wasn’t solid. Walking in, she picked up very strong leftover fear from the previous guest. Around the corner in the bathroom she got a vivid picture of a big male lion’s head staring at her through the window, though he wasn’t there. At dinner she asked if there had been lions near number three recently. Yes, just last week: lions walked through camp, guests must never leave their tent, and armed guides collect you each morning. The driver kept saying “gala,” and she asked what language it was. He said Swahili (he spoke English to her because he was South African), and gala meant lion. She kept hearing “Lalapanzi” too, which he said meant lying down sleeping, and that is how she has always remembered it: it flows off the tongue nicely. That night she slept fine. The next night, tired, she woke in the dark needing the loo. The bathroom has floor-to-ceiling glass. She switched on the light, and a real lion was lying against the glass with his back to her, not facing her like the vision. When the light came on he turned and looked. She turned it off and went back to bed. An hour later she needed the loo again, and went without turning the light on, figuring he wouldn’t notice. She felt the first was ambient energy from someone else’s fear, which conditioned her not to be terrified. She thinks the lions enjoyed their nightly visits.
On an afternoon drive searching for rhino, they saw six. To get closer, the vehicle trail-blazed through spiders. She sat in the front seat beside the ranger, with the tracker sitting out front. They went through a huge web with a huge spider, and she ducked to get out from under it. The ranger stopped the vehicle, so the spider was right over her. She screamed and tried to get out of the way (she remembers it now as a squeak, and a scream inside her head, but her journal says she screamed). The spider ended up on the roll bar behind her head: the size of her palm, with long, sharp, spindly legs and bright colours. The people in the seat behind scrunched into the corner. The rhinos were far enough away that they could hear the vehicle but not see her. Closer, they would have attacked. They didn’t. They stayed about 5 to 7 metres away (the rule is never approach the animals; animals may approach you). A baby rhino was just following its mum. The group stopped and looked toward the vehicle, the baby too, with poor eyesight but great hearing. The ranger chuckled for the rest of the day (“HAHAHA smarty pants!”), she stayed edgy, and her seat became known as “the spider seat.” She says the spider was far worse than the lion: terrifying, and she has blocked out the details.
Driving in the open vehicle, she was told by the ranger that impala are “the Big Mac of the safari. Everybody ate them.” In her journal that day she wrote of kudu and impala, “the McDonald’s of the park.” Lions, leopards and cheetahs all had their eye on them.
Of all the stories she had to tell from Africa, one was “the baby elephant that couldn’t work his trunk yet. He was trying and trying to grasp some grass and get it in his mouth and he just couldn’t! So his elder sister put her bunch in his mouth. It was soooooo cute, and the best part is I got a picture of it!”
In January 2002, driving from the Whitsundays toward Adelaide in her red ’86 Toyota Corona wagon, Guidance told her to carry extra water because the car would overheat, so she packed four gallons, in two two-gallon jugs. Passing drivers kept signaling that something was wrong, but Susie kept driving. Liz asked Susie what the heat gauge was doing, and she said it was all the way over. Liz told her to pull over immediately. They were about 50 km from Cobar, and the dry radiator, unable to keep the engine cool, killed the block. It was done. A Telstra employee stopped first to help, then a fireman with a two-way radio called the NRMA, and the car was towed into Cobar. They found a ride to Broken Hill and flew on to Adelaide. She never got the car back, since the repair cost too much.
Brisbane is where she met her first rhinoceros beetle. She was at a friend’s house, which had a wall that opens up for outdoor living inside. They were sitting on the couch with a lovely breeze when there was a blood-curdling scream. “OMG! What is that?!” The scream was the beetle: rhinoceros beetles scream when they are on their backs, and they keep at it until someone turns them over. Rather nonchalantly, her friend said, “Oh, it’s just a beetle.” “A WHAT?!” she said, and her friend turned it right-side up and held it up: a black-shelled beetle eight inches long, four inches of body and four inches of horned front. They have the biggest bugs in Australia!
“In Brisbane, the first time, I stayed with a friend and her family. Lovely couple and lovely friendship. I credit her for helping me get started on this lifestyle of traveling and working with people.”
At Christmas 2000, she checked into a hotel in Phuket right by the sea, in a room on the ground floor. As soon as she lay down she had a vision of water coming in fast, filling the room to the ceiling in seconds. It was terrifying, and she did not know what it meant. She got up and looked out of her hallway door; the other door was a slider to the pool and then the sea. She asked herself: what would I do if this happened? Where would I go? The stairs were eight feet away, so she would go up. It was very strong and very real, and it got her heart racing. She felt the tsunami, very, very strongly, before it ever happened. Years later, on Christmas 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami struck that coast.
She landed at Tokyo airport and walked around. It was uncomfortable, and she was not sure why. The more she walked around the airport, the more she felt like she was in enemy territory. Then she realised she was carrying her father’s hatred from the war. Once she realised that, she let it go and started to enjoy herself.
One of the funniest things in all her travels. Being a Seattleite, home of Starbucks, she went to the one in the airport and ordered a Frappuccino. The cashier yelled “Frap-poo-chinooooooo” in a high-pitched Japanese voice, like a Saturday Night Live skit. She nearly fell over trying not to laugh and embarrass herself or the cashier. She SO wanted to record it, but nobody else ordered one, so she never captured it for posterity.
The festival in Brisbane was cancelled, so she took a vacation there instead and went to Sea World to swim with the dolphins. She has to say it was not as good as when she did it in the Bahamas, but she did get a picture of herself hugging the dolphin, and one of it jumping over her.
She went up to the Great Barrier Reef with two girlfriends and out to Great Keppel Island for the day to snorkel, and it rained! She got to see what it looks like to fish when it rains, which she had always wanted to see. It just figured that the day she picked was “school day”: two classes of junior-high-age kids, about 120 or so, all went snorkelling too!
In Canberra, in a parking lot near the shops in the civic centre, she found a very interesting public toilet. It was automated: the door slid open by itself “just like in Star Trek” and even made a similar noise. There was no roll of paper, only a dispenser where you push a button and get about five squares. She felt like a glutton for pushing it five times to get twenty-five “measly squares.”
Many of her friends know what she does for a living, so she wanted to see if she could pick up anything from a genuinely haunted place. She took a ghost tour of convict sites in Hobart with a friend. It was just the two of them and the guide, who was genuine, and his monotone delivery made it even scarier. She was too tightly wound to pick up much: a raw tobacco smell, and a strong sense of death when she looked through a window into a room the tour had not yet gone into. Oddly enough, it turned out to be the gallows area. Her friend picked up more, smelling vinegar, and they both felt the coldness, which of course is the etheric.
She had been trying for about three years to get inside a Cadbury chocolate factory, and the one just outside Hobart has tours, so she went. She had long wondered whether Cadbury was English or not: the New Zealanders said it was NZ chocolate and the Australians said Australian, but her first instinct was right, it is English. The woman at the front desk of her motel had asked her to buy “chockies” for her staff for Chrissy, so she wound up buying about 20 boxes of Roses, little individually wrapped bites they don’t have in the States. Contrary to what you might think, she didn’t go hog wild herself: hot chocolate mix she had never seen, and a few “millennium bugs.” “Dreams of swimming in chocolate… it was amazing to see so much in one place!”
Tasmania is beautiful: it reminds her of New Zealand and Northern California. She got off her duff and hiked up to Wineglass Bay, a pristine white-sand beach curved in the shape of the bell of a wine glass, nestled in a mountain range. It was well worth the straight-up trek and her heart nearly jumping out of her chest, it was beating so hard. But on the way down her camera decided to freak out. She later discovered it was her lens, her favourite one, now broken.
On her last full day in Tassie she was in her red ’86 Toyota Corona station wagon, driving towards Burnie, and she couldn’t reach her maps. So she unbuckled her seat belt to grab one off the floor on the passenger side. About five blocks later she saw a blue car behind her with its bright lights flashing first on the right, then the left, going back and forth. Her slow brain thought “oh my… that’s different,” then she saw the red light, and he finally put the siren on. “He must have thought he had a blind, deaf granny!” When she pulled over she hit the curb and felt like a complete idiot. “You scared me!” she said. He said he had pulled her over for not wearing her seat belt. “You pulled me over for that?!”
Back in Melbourne after the ferry from Tasmania, she stayed up and danced with her moon shadow on a night with the brightest full moon in 133 years. “It was lovely… isn’t life amazing?”
“Melbourne, I stayed with a friend from the Internet who had a spare room. Every time I came to Australia, every year, I got to see him and catch up on his life. One year I spent Christmas in Melbourne and I had McDonald’s. They call it Macka’s. Macka’s is McDonald’s, and I had McDonald’s for Christmas dinner. I didn’t really do anything special and I felt very lonely that day. He had to work. But it was nice to have it different, because it felt like summer, because it was summer where I was. I was in Australia. Oddly enough, his nickname is Macka.”
The holidays were a bit harder on her that year, and the Salvation Army had no volunteer jobs when she called about five different numbers. So she went to Phillip Island, an island near Melbourne with penguins and beautiful coastline, for Christmas Day in about 90-degree heat. She checked out the beach and the surfers. That night a friend and she went to some friends of his after eating McDonald’s along the way. They thought the friends had already eaten and, well, they hadn’t. “Somehow McDonald’s fit that day perfectly.” It was a lovely time, with lots of laughs and camaraderie.
She landed in Sydney with exactly five days to get to her storage unit, switch to summer clothes, buy a car and drive 15 hours to Adelaide. Jet lag hit hard and she slept the first two days, which left three. She went online and looked up Toyota Camrys and found a great one: it was the only one she looked at, because she knew it was the one. It was a 1992 white station wagon with only about 60,000 miles on it. When she got there she saw it had the word “Spirit” painted in small letters on the side. “What a confirmation!” Then she drove 14 hours, nearly to Adelaide, without one problem, and worked out that it got over 600 K to the tank, even with the AC on.
On the drive back from Cooktown to Cairns, she kept picking up that she needed to get the car in for service. Over and over she was being told. About five hours later she reached Cairns, picked something up at an office-supply store, pulled out of the driveway into traffic and waited at the light. As soon as she got into the intersection the car died, “and I mean DIES.” She rolled into a side street and called the roadside service, like AAA. The man chain-towed her, with her braking whenever he raised his hand. Forty-eight hours and a used distributor later she was on her way to Brisbane. He was so nice, and charged only about 250 bucks.
She and a friend stopped for two nights in Port Douglas, supposedly the closest town to the Great Barrier Reef, and took an all-day tour to see the Daintree Rainforest. They had a picnic along a secluded little river, canoed and saw lots of wildfowl. It was absolutely lovely, with turtles, fish and forest dragons, rather large lizard-like reptiles. She got some great pictures!
Susie and Liz went on an outback safari. They saw Uluru at daybreak and again at sunset. At Kings Canyon Liz slipped and fell, gouging a huge part of her knee and literally leaving a part of herself behind. After seeing the Olgas, the tour bus broke down, and they waited for a part to arrive in the middle of absolutely nowhere. They explored the outback on dune buggies and rode camels, where they learned the Northern Territory is the only place in the world with actual wild camels.
She went diving off Kangaroo Island in freezing water to see the leafy sea dragon. Most divers never see one, but she did! One even came out. She views it as another gift from Guidance!
She and a friend took the Ghan train from Adelaide to Alice Springs, following the route of the 1860s explorers who brought in the camels that became Australia's wild ones. A week before the Ghan's grand opening, she felt like she was part of Australian history. They arrived after 18 sleepless hours into 105-degree heat, and the Ute's air conditioner failed, so two days of driving followed with a towel over her window. On the sun side she got heat stroke, with nausea and a near scream, until twenty minutes of cool air at an evaporator-cooled rest stop set her right.
She dove at Cook Island, then drove south to Byron Bay and dove at Julian Rocks, one of the ten best dive sites in Australia. It was lovely, and she saw her first grey nurse shark. It was too dark to get a picture of it. At both places she had the most fun diving she has ever had, and she was able to get some good photos with her digital camera, as well as be bitten by a fish and attacked by coral! Hehehe.
She had a tour of the Olympic site while it was still being built, and they're doing an incredible job. Her advice is not to bring a car, because they're setting up trains that will move 50,000 people an hour.
At Troy she learned there are six layers of the city, each built right over the one before. A German man became obsessed with proving Homer’s story true and started digging. He believed he had found Troy number four, the richest version and the proof the Iliad was real. Fifteen years later it was discovered that he had actually found Troy number two.
Ephesus was one of her favorite places, and it left such an impact that she never forgot it through the years. It was the second most important city in the Roman Empire, and each culture built a new one on or near the last, so there were five versions of it through antiquity. The one being excavated is version three, where homes had running water, central heating and cooling, and even a toilet that flushed the debris away! She spent three hours at the site, then drove to the little house where Mary is said to have lived and lit a candle.
The fairy chimneys of Cappadocia are formations of sandstone from volcanic ash that people hollowed out to live in. An amazing sight! She was also able to see the Whirling Dervishes, whose twirling is a form of meditation and a deeply religious connection to God. They were the only ones there and felt very fortunate, because the second show was nothing like the intimacy of the first.
Pergamon, built on a hill, had the second largest library of the ancient world. When it outbid Alexandria for Aristotle's books, Egypt stopped supplying papyrus, so Pergamon invented parchment from sheep skin.
Avebury has a lesser known stone circle with large stones. Liz bought divining rods at a local shop and they kept turning and pointing to her, no matter what she did. So she had a friend hold them as they walked by the stones. The rods kept following her: she moved back and they followed, she moved forward and they followed. The longer she was in the circle, the more her left ear hurt, like a sudden ear infection. It got worse the closer she got to the stones! Her ear continued to throb until she was a mile outside the circle, then the earache suddenly went away!
For years she had wanted to meditate inside a fresh crop circle, and on a tour they managed to get into one, the “OM” circle, made less than 48 hours earlier. She says the energy was subtle at first, then felt like a light vibration against her skin. Once she moved away from someone talking on a cell phone, she was able to meditate and connect. The message she received was about connecting, everyone growing together. “Not bad for my first crop circle!”
She taught an all-day class in Camberley, England, without her voice. Talk about needing patience! Her promoter, the first official promoter she'd worked with, whispered with her and passed on to the class what to do. She was a big help and became a friend.
After seeing Val Kilmer in a London show, she waited at the stage door for his autograph, though she'd forgotten her camera. Not ready to go back to the hotel, she walked around until Guidance gave her a strong pull into a particular pub, and there he was. She had a drink and made a new friend. Too scared to talk to him the first night, she went back the next night alone, gathered the gumption and shook his hand. "The big thing for me was that I didn't let my silly fear get in the way."
Leaving Europe after seven months, she paid a pretty penny at Stansted for an overweight suitcase. Surprised, she said yes when the clerk asked if she'd been in Wellington, New Zealand! The clerk had taken her class there four years earlier. She took it as spirit’s sign that her work helps people, so don't sweat the small stuff. "She still had to charge me though."
When their van broke down on the Dorset coast, she walked the cold beach barefoot, not knowing an oil tanker had spilled up the coast the day before. She stepped right into tar and ended up with two nearly black feet! The cute lifeguards sent her and her friends to their office, where they finally got it off with spirits. "I was concerned I'd never get it off!"
Driving a rented Peugeot out of Paris toward Normandy, she was full of trepidation. Her mom wasn't thrilled when she photographed the Arc de Triomphe while driving toward it. "Hey, it's easy if you rest the camera on the steering wheel!" Coming back, she drove like the locals do, "when in Rome," and her mom didn't like it one bit, but it beat being honked at.
On her first visit to an Arabic country, she had a four-hour layover in Dubai and, being on a protein diet, went looking for food. The vendor swore the odd-looking meat was chicken, but it turned out to be gizzards! "Who eats only chicken gizzards? Bloody hell!" She managed about five bites, then paid two dollars for a latte and headed to her gate.
After her friends moved on to Phi Phi island she went diving there again and learned how well she can swim and dive, as it was the toughest dive yet, with lots of surge and current. She always seems to win on least amount of air used, which she takes as a good sign of comfort and ease, since you suck it down if you are scared or working too hard. “Mom relax!” (Her mom is nervous about her diving.)
Her friends from Melbourne arrived and they went diving on Christmas Day to the Similan Islands. “Now THIS beats the GB reef! The clarity and abundance of fish was spectacular.” No wonder, she says, it’s one of the top ten dive sites in the world. She has such the diving bug!
She was blonde and in the sun all the time in Thailand. Diving the Similans, there was a huge water surge that lifted everyone up 5-8 feet at a time and set them back down again. A big Dutch guy, a dive buddy, was scared as hell (a wuss, lol) and stayed with the dive lead the whole time, while she dived on her own and was fine. Diving alone in that huge surge made it even more “treacherous”, but she had Guidance and felt no fear.
In Bangkok she got a Thai massage in her hotel and has to tell you, “I’d not have gotten it if I knew they bloody stood on ya!” Given the energy she experienced in Bangkok, you only need one night there. A day later she flew to Phuket.
She loved the Egyptian museum in Cairo, but was exhausted from all the energy in the building. She could tangibly feel energies off some of the stonework, and one particular mummy she saw visions with and felt strongly towards. She felt glad to leave the museum.
“Cairo, I flew in with my friend and she had a cast on her foot because she broke her foot on Cyprus. Because of that they took us off the plane by a freight elevator at the back of the plane. And because we were American and my friend was not dressed correctly, she had shown her shoulders and it wasn’t modest enough for that country, they charged us twice the amount for a visa to get in the country.”
Amsterdam has more bikes than she had ever seen! Instead of cars or the metro, everyone rides, and the bike parking at Central Station is huge, with many floors like a mall garage, packed with thousands of bikes.
“On the positive side of Amsterdam, I got to spend some time with my good friend Mary. She’s one of my spiritual sisters and she feels like family to me. She and I have travelled together to Brazil and to Paris, and I went to visit her in Georgia when she lived there, and in Paris, and in Holland.”
On a bus tour through The Hague, she hit her head hard on an overhang as she sat down. She felt the energy of the impact travel around her head and out her neck, putting it out in two places. “That was a first!” She slept it off, and later an American chiropractor set her straight.
After teaching two workshops in Achel, she stayed overnight in Brussels and loved it: “It’s completely different than Amsterdam and I’d like to go back and be a tourist.” She loved the great square with its 12th to 14th century buildings, saw the little boy statue at the fountain, and tried a real Belgian waffle with Belgian chocolate and almonds. “Oh my God it was great!”
Venice flooded with a high tide, with a few feet of water, and everyone had to shuffle along raised platforms. She had to get a package to the post office before it closed, so she took her shoes off and slogged through the water. She was the only one who did it, though that night her body got hot, as if it were fighting off an infection. The day they left, the high-tide siren went off, and they were glad to be leaving.
Leaving her postage stamp sized room they took the bullet train to Shizuoka. While waiting, she wanted to take a picture of the train and leaned up against the fence. An urgent announcement came over the speaker and she just ignored it. Her translator pulled her back and said you need to be careful of the train. Nothing like being the worst tourist ever!
With her translator she visited the ancient town of Kamakura. What struck her first about Japan was the vending machines, along roads, in alleys and randomly standing alone, with green tea, soda drinks and socks! They never seemed to be broken into. At a temple there sits the second biggest Buddha, second to the one on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. He even had huge rope slippers from the 15th century.
About a year earlier Guidance had said they wanted her to go to Japan, and she answered “oh... are you sure? I will go if you make it happen.” She couldn’t find a flight from Seattle to Sydney under $2,500, but interestingly, for a limited time, Japan Airlines had a special from Vancouver that was less than half the price and included a free layover in Japan. “I just smiled... Guidance again.” Coming home, customs employees questioned her at baggage claim like never before, even asking what seat she sat in on the plane.
Whenever she is in Hong Kong she heads up to Shenzhen to shop. This time, with two friends, she learned that as of April Americans can no longer get a visa at the border. “It was a huge bummer” as they had planned to stay the night and keep shopping. She went back to Hong Kong and spent the day at the Chinese consulate getting her visa, and the next day they went up again and it was great fun.
“I went to Shenzhen with some friends I made from Hong Kong. I went shopping and they had beautiful beaded purses. The first time I went to Hong Kong I brought gifts back for friends, these beautiful beaded purses. The people were ecstatic and loved them. The next time I went to Hong Kong I went over to Shenzhen again, and I decided to start a handbag business where I would import beaded bags and sell them. I named the company La Jolie.” The beaded-purse gifts were in November 2003, and she named La Jolie in December 2004.
Her friend’s trip to Cyprus was fraught with troubles, all because her passport expired two months from the date she flew. “A word to the wise,” some countries won’t let you in without six or more months of validity left. A tired Cyprus Airways employee let her sneak into Cyprus, and then they went to the US embassy in Nicosia to get her a new passport. Since they were there, Liz added pages to hers.
On a five-hour layover at the Bangkok airport, flying from Bali to Africa, she spent about two hours at the post office stamping nearly 200 postcards, two stamps and an airmail ink stamp on each, since she had run out of time to mail them in Bali. The guys behind the counter kept shaking their heads: “crazy foreigner.” She got lots of looks. “LOL”
Her flight from Cyprus was cancelled, so she took an earlier one at 5:20 am into Istanbul. After a nap at her hotel, by eight she was eating her first meal in Turkey at a nearby El Torito, one of her favorite Mexican restaurants. “It was a California chain!”
“I love Rome!” On a tour with a friend she wound up at St. Peter’s the day the Pope canonized four new saints, and they took communion. (“No I am not Catholic, but I respect all religions.”) They went back on Wednesday with tickets from the Bishop of Seattle, sat in a cordoned-off area, and got some “slightly blurry” pictures of the Popemobile, plus blessings to pass on to family and friends.
She arrived in Singapore in early December after six weeks in the Mediterranean, and it felt like a huge party. Orchard Street was strung with sparkling lights and garlands, the closest thing to Disneyland’s electrical parade. Jet lag hit hard, then a cold took her voice, so she taught a class whispering into a microphone. Of all the cultures she has visited, she says the men there were the most open to the spiritual side of things.
At Bondi Beach she had an apartment with no elevator, up the stairs to the sixth floor, or maybe the fourth. The view of Bondi Beach was beautiful.
“From Joburg I got on a very small plane to the Sabi Sands. I had a very painful ear infection and told the pilot who said he could take me to a bush doctor. My mind immediately went to the native African bush doctor with a bone through his nose, but was pleasantly surprised by a rather handsome Dutch Afrikaans "bush doctor" who gave me three large “horse” pills that took care of it in three days! From there we drove to Savanna camp."
“In South Africa I have Internet friends who were really kind. One man let me use his beat-up car for the few weeks we were there. It was so kind of him.”
“I stayed with another South African friend that I met online. She’s great and I got to see what it was like in Joburg. They had bars over all the windows and doors, and when it’s hot they leave the doors open with the bars there. As we were talking in the kitchen, a man came up to the bars, put his arms into her kitchen and started talking to her, wanting money, wanting stuff. It was actually a kind of scary experience.”
“I went to Copenhagen to meet a friend I have known for years online but never met in person. It felt like a long time old friend and comfortable and completely normal. We had fun exploring Copenhagen together and catching up.”
In Greece, Guidance said someone was following her. They had her turn down into an alley, and she said, “What!? Why?” They said, “Trust us.” The man followed. She turned around and walked toward him inside her glowing energy bubble, and he stammered, “I’m I’m I’m not following you.” Then she walked past him, saying nothing, and right out of the frame. “They made my energy huge and had me stare directly into the guy, who was shocked and stuttered, ‘I’m, I’m, I’m not following you.’ I said nothing and walked out of the alley. He didn’t follow and left me alone after that.” The man had an American accent and held his American passport out in his hand. “He had it out in his hand, which made no sense, but I said nothing to him.”
“Muscat was a dive experience. I had a break from Dubai and I went and had the dive experience. I once had a goal that I wanted to be in every large body of water, diving.”
“Blue Mountains is outside of Sydney. I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast that had the best omelette in the morning. I stayed there for a few days and did readings.”
“I was working in Vienna and I took the train and met my mom in Paris. From there we rented a car and went up to Normandy. That’s where I saw the soldier who asked me for a smoke. We were at the World War II American Cemetery.”
“When I was returning from a trip back to Seattle, I was at a Starbucks and there was a woman standing in front of me. I was so happy to hear her voice, the American accent. It felt like home, she felt like home. She had no idea who I was; she never turned around. I had to hold myself back from giving her a hug because I was so happy to be home.” “She felt like home because it was my people, my accent, my American way of life. You miss those kinds of things when you’re away for so long.”
In Australia, in Queensland (maybe Cairns), she went for a haircut and highlights, and the salon bleached her blonde. Some of her hair melted off and came away with the foil as the stylist unrolled it, leaving bald spots, lol. That was just before she left for Thailand. Then, when she came home, she was driving her aubergine Saturn with her dog Axel in the back seat and was meeting her mom downtown at the Symphony in Seattle: “She was already in the city, so it was easier for me to see her.” Her mom recognized the car and the dog, but not her, because she hadn’t seen her in months.
She was on a dungeon tour around Halloween, in Edinburgh, a town that felt young even though it was very old. “I’m a bit more outgoing when I travel by myself, I talk a lot to people, you never know who you’re gonna meet.” Because of that, she was singled out and locked in a pillory, a wooden board that holds your head and wrists in holes so you can't get out.
“Cape Town is beautiful. Lion’s Head was gorgeous and the beaches were lovely... we took the cable car up to Table Mountain, and saw the beautiful view. Had a nice cuppa.”
After her sold out show at the Mind Body Spirit Festival in 1999 in Sydney Australia, Liz also had to add a day of readings at the shop she was working from in Balmain. She returned in 2003 and worked from the same shop for a whole month.
The day after her finger surgery in Cairns, a friend drove them north to Cooktown, four hours past Port Douglas. “You can’t tell on the map that the road to Cooktown is not entirely paved. I got my real first bush experience getting up there!” About a third of it was unpaved.
Stranded in Cobar after her car broke down, she and her friend had less than 36 hours to reach Adelaide for a flight to Alice Springs and an outback safari they had already paid for. Her friend found them a ride with two men driving to Broken Hill the next day, who were flying on from there to Adelaide. A man from the pub let them use his work phone, and the airline “just happened to have a sale on one-way tickets from Broken Hill to Adelaide! So we were sorted.”
From Alice Springs it was two days of driving in over 105-degree heat with no air conditioning, a towel over her window, to reach Lajamanu, an Aboriginal community “only reachable by air or 4-wheel drive track.” “The rich rust colored dirt road was lined with beautiful green grass and reflective water puddles… Then add the fantastically blue sky… its unreal colors speak of an artists rendering and not nature!” She stayed five days and felt very privileged to be there. She left on a 16-seat plane that made several stops on the way back to Alice Springs.
Day one of her Turkey tour started with an early flight to Ankara. At the airport she met an American couple doing the same tour, and the only other person on her tour was a Protestant minister. “I didn’t tell either of them what I do.” They visited the Anatolian Museum and Atatürk’s Mausoleum. Turkey as it is today is only about 70 years old.
Driving through Konya for lunch, she visited the Dervish Museum and Mausoleum. Rumi, who founded the Dervishes, was a 13th-century mystic. She saw his commemorative tomb and those of the head dervishes. He was buried in a shroud so he would go back into the soil. The green turban means spirituality, and the bigger the turban, the higher they are in the order. 510 km later, she went from a very cold climate to the warm Mediterranean. “Thank GOD!!!”
Aphrodisias was a Roman art centre, famous for the marble in its hills. “This city was amazing as it had a HUGE football field length pool that filled the center oblong inside the agora, or shopping area.” It had a football-size stadium too. Excavation teams were still uncovering it, and in the museum the very biggest statues were away being cleaned.
The 6:30 am ferry across the Dardanelles was held up by thick fog, but they crossed from the Asian side of Turkey to the European side about an hour and 15 minutes later. At Anzac Cove, where the Australians and New Zealanders first landed in WWI, reading Atatürk’s words to the bereaved families made her want to cry. She gathered some sand from the landing beach for Australian friends for Anzac Day. Nearby, a memorial remembers a Turkish soldier who carried a wounded English soldier to the English side, then went back to his own.
After lunch in the hill village of Sirince, the tour drove on to Izmir. With four hours before dinner, she went on “a great shopping expedition,” then wore her new green embroidered dress to dinner.
She began her six-month trek of 2002 in Istanbul, then crossed into Bursa and got to spend some time at the beautiful Green Mosque. Those tiles are an amazing hue and have lasted forever!
Day one of the Sacred England tour, the guide drove the group from their hotel by Heathrow to Windsor Castle. The Queen was home as the standard was flying above the castle. Then came the “long” two-hour drive to Glastonbury. “Everything is so close in England, two hours is a long way for them. Heck, in the states we’d not think twice to drive two hours someplace!”
After a long day of hikes to places she would never have seen without the tour. She got to experience St Nectan’s Glen, where a fifth-century hermit is said to be buried under the waterfall. They meditated in his small cell, but felt much more at the waterfall than his cell. They hiked down Rocky Valley to two Bronze Age carvings and meditated by the sea. By Tintagel most of them were exhausted. They threw a rock for luck in Merlin’s cave and then caught the last shuttle up the long hill. They never made it to Tintagel Castle, but saw it from the outside. It was a very long day.
On the last full day they crossed the bridge into Wales, had tea by the remains of Tintern Abbey, and went on to Hereford Cathedral, where Grand Master Thomas de Cantelupe is buried. The whole group had an amazing connection to his tomb. “I felt my heart expand and allow myself to love deeply, something I had shut off to protect myself years ago.” Afterwards she gathered everyone at the back of the cathedral, led a deep meditation and did readings for each person to wrap up the trip. “Some were profound some not, I don’t remember, I was channeling!”
Of her whole 2005 trip through France, “My favorite was the Loire Valley, it has so much to offer.” The visit changed her outlook on France: people for the most part were very nice and very helpful. What she loved about the culture were the flowers everywhere: climbing on buildings, in window boxes, in pots and on bridges. And her dog would love it there, allowed in restaurants, shops and food markets, pretty much everywhere!
On her Italy tour they also got to Pompeii, the city Mt Vesuvius covered in ash, “freezing that moment in time for all eternity.” “It’s just amazing! This place was like walking back in time.”
After seven months on the road in Europe, she flew back to LA, swapped her winter clothes for summer ones, and headed to Australia two days later for the Mind Body Spirit festival in Sydney. The next spring she was back for three days to visit her brother for his birthday. “I didn’t do much else other than rest and try to get on local time.”
In March 2002 she flew to Cyprus to stay on the British army base at Dhekelia, give a talk and book readings. It was “cold cold cold” after a hot Australian summer, and her last day was lovely and warm. She had no intention of returning, but the wonderful people she met talked her into it. That November she was back, in a hotel apartment near the waterfront, with “much better feeling and energy than the last two times.” She gave lectures and was booked out from The Curiosity House, a shop run by a friend, a true spiritual sister.
On her day off in Hong Kong, she and a friend took a fast ferry to Macau, an hour away. The Portuguese settled it, and it has “a unique hybrid of European charm and Chinese style.” There was even a Starbucks! They shopped, got a massage, and had a yummy Portuguese dinner.
One hundred and twenty-one stories are illustrated so far. The other pins show a short note, and more drawings can be added as stories are chosen.