Abigail Oesterling took pictures of some surfing at sunrise at Port Macquarie, Australia, located between Sydney and Brisbane.

Abigail Oesterling of Butler has a serious case of wanderlust. She spent a year working and traveling through Australia, coming back in March. And she is gearing up for a trip to Ireland this weekend, which by now counts as just a short jaunt for her.

Oesterling, a 2007 graduate of Portersville Christian School, said she studied for a semester in Italy and spent four months living in Japan before setting off for Australia in March 2014.

“I lived and worked and traveled, of course,” said Oesterling, 26. “Australia issues working holiday visas, so you can work and earn enough money to keep traveling.”

“I wanted to see Australia,” she said. “I thought I should try it while I can.”

Oesterling said she wasn't worried about traveling alone.

“It's not like it's a Third World country, it's Australia,” she said, although she said her brother would e-mail her tidbits off the Internet about the country's varied and lethal animals, from bird-catching spiders to salt water crocodiles.

“I was OK with going by myself,” she said. “I'd traveled by myself before. I was pretty good at it.”

“I flew from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles,” Oesterling said. “And then I flew from L.A. to Sydney nonstop. It was 15 hours. On the way back, the flight was from Sydney to Dallas which was 17-18 hours. It is literally the longest flight in the world.”

“I landed in Sydney,” Oesterling said. “We were in Sydney for a week. There is a company that helps you set up a bank account and get a tax number. You made a resume and did a tour of Sydney.”

She said after that week, her group, mostly made up of Britons, split up and everybody went their own ways.

Oesterling spent a year traveling on the east coast of Australia from Sydney south and west to Adelaide and then into the interior of the continent to Ayers Rock and the gigantic Uluru landmark, then north and east to the city of Cairns, where she spent six months, south again to the island of Tasmania, then Melbourne and finally Sydney where she caught the long, long flight back to the United States.

“I basically made a giant loop,” she said.“I just spent 20 hours on a plane,” said Oesterling about her arrival in Australia. “I definitely want to stay awhile. Being able to make money while you are traveling is definitely a huge incentive.She said she supported herself during her travels by working as a house sitter, nanny, waitress, English teacher to Japanese students and as a hostel receptionist.She said she traveled light, mostly with just a suitcase and a backpack and flew by commuter airline to her different destinations.Oesterling said it was hard to pick a favorite location, although she did say Tasmania was beautiful.She said that 75 percent of the Australian population lives in cities along the coast, and that the interior of the continent was sparsely populated.“I did a surf camp for a week when I first got there,” Oesterling said. “And on the trip down the coast, I would surf a couple of days.”“And when I was in Cairns, I made a lot of friends. I just started playing beach volleyball pretty much every day and met people that way,” she said.In Cairns the climate tended toward the tropical.“It was really, really warm at Christmas. It was like 90 degrees,” she said, noting the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, so November, December and January are Australia's summer.She said it was hard to answer what the Australians were like because she didn't meet many actual Australians. “A lot of the people I met were travelers, too,” she said.“It's amazing. I thought Australia would be more British than it was. The Britons there thought it would be more 'American' than it was,” she said.

She did run into some Australian animals. “We were walking in a wildlife sanctuary and I chased a kangaroo out of the woods. They are basically the deer of Australia,” Oesterling said.And because of the jellyfish in the oceans around Australia, she was obliged to wear a “stingsuit” to protect herself while surfing and diving.She also encountered Australian food.“I ran into Vegemite, which is a yeast-based sandwich spread,” she said. “And Weetabix, a breakfast cereal. And meat pies. They have them everywhere. They have whole shops devoted to them.”Unfortunately, she said, she was also exposed to the country's ordeal when a man held 17 hostages in a Sydney coffee shop in December, a situation that ended with the police storming the building and the deaths of the alleged captor and two hostages.“That was really interesting,” she said. “Here, we are in a way desensitized to this. Australians aren't. Guns are more restricted there. It doesn't happen like that there.”“That's why it was very different for them,” she said.Still, the incident didn't dampen Oesterling's urge to travel. In fact, she's leaving the country again.“I'm going to Ireland, but its only for a week,” she said.

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Abigail Oesterling of Butler came home in March after spending a year living and traveling in Australia. She poses on the Bay of Fires on the coast of Tasmania, an island off the Australian coast.

Abigail Oesterling, second from right, and friends she made while playing beach volleyball snorkel off Fitzroy Island near the city of Cairns. Oesterling spent six months in Cairns.

Uluru is a large sandstone formation in the southern part of the Northern Territory in central Australia. Abigail snapped this picture at sunset. Uluru is a sacred site to the aboriginal people.

This is the view from the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia. The road, built by soldiers between 1919 and 1932, is dedicated to troops killed during World War I. It is called the world's largest war memorial and stretches 151 miles from Melbourne to Adelaide.

This is some of the sea life Abigail Osterling enountedred when she went skindiving off the Great Barrier Reef.