Category Archives: Travel


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Monday Melburnian Meanderings

Monday is one of our last designated tourist days – the day is ours until a dinner booking later. To be honest we feel like we’ve mostly run out of the obvious touristy stuff to do in Melbourne now though; makes sense I suppose, we ticked a bunch of stuff off when we were here a couple of years ago a well. Next trip to Australia we’ll probably cut the Melbourne time down to just catching up with people and go explore somewhere else with the extra time.
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Australia Three: Back in the City

After the wonderful wedding weekend (because alliteration) we’re back into Melbourne on Sunday morning on the train. We’re in another Mercure for this section of the trip, near the Queen Vic markets – not quite as convenient as the last one but still only 10-15 minutes walk from the train station. We drop our bags (it’s still far too early to check in) and head back out.
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The wedding; no *you’re* a valley

We’re heading out of Melbourne to the Yarra Valley. It’s wine country with vineyards of various sizes, from the very small to the quite large, about an hour outside of Melbourne. I was surprised on the drive quite how quickly the place transitions from urban to rural, I think I’ve had that thought in Australia previously too.
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Melbourne: Part Deux

The previous episode ended with us saying our goodbyes to Erin’s dad at Bendigo train station, now it’s Wednesday evening and we’re on the way back into Melbourne for another go. It’s been nice having a few quiet days in the country but we’re ready for a bit more hustle and bustle again.
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Back out to the Outback

After the busy tourism-filled days of Sydney and then the ~22 mostly-awake hours in Melbourne it was time for some downtime – we were on a train to the countryside on Sunday afternoon to spend a few days with Erin’s dad and stepmother. This section of the trip condenses quite well into a single post as it really was some well-needed relax time.
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Finishing Sydney, Fly-By of Melbourne

Saturday morning dawns and again we’re up early – 7am. While Erin doesn’t leave until tomorrow my flight to Melbourne is this afternoon; I had changed it to make the stag do for the wedding we’re going to next week. That means we have a few hours to fit some stuff into and the plan is to have a look around an island in Sydney Harbour, Cockatoo Island.
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Sydney: Getting all Manly

Friday morning we’re up and about at 8am. Our first post-flight sleep has gone pretty well for me – I got all the way to 7.30 – and slightly less well but still not too bad for Erin, who woke at 4. I’ve got a slightly weird adversarial relationship with my body (as demonstrated by the walking last week!) where I ignore what it’s telling me and force it to do stuff anyway. It’s not really a good thing but it does work out quite well for handling jet lag; I’m declaring victory already, 24 hours in. Timezones, you will not defeat me!
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Sydney: jet lag and food orgasms

Note: I originally thought I’d be able to batch the various parts of the Australia trip into multi-day-spanning posts, but it turns out that we packed quite a lot into both the traveling and the first day in Sydney. I’ll probably manage it better for future days!
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Istanbul and Athens: final thoughts

I wanted to put up a short post with some final thoughts on Athens and Istanbul and the whole experience. It’s now Friday and I arrived back in the UK from Istanbul last Sunday but I’ve since traveled to Australia so it’s been hard to find the time to do that! Also, sometime a bit further down the line (at this point we’re probably talking in a month’s time) I’ll go through the many pictures I took and post a selection of the best/most meaningful rather than the somewhat random selection I posted day by day.
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