A Trip Of A Lifetime

Hello all!

Well, for once I have lots to tell! I finally made it to Perth, after a couple of weeks travelling from Sydney...

The last week or so in Sydney was pretty busy just getting organised for my trip, and trying to make the most of the last of my time there. I finished up at yet another deathly dull job on 25th January and officially switched to holiday mode :-) Thursday 26th January was Australia Day, and I spent most of the day in the city flitting to and from Circular Quay and The Rocks to Darling Harbour as there was lots going on - live bands, food stalls etc. and of course the Ferrython (a ferry race across the Harbour!). I stayed on til the evening for the fireworks at Darling Harbour, they got there eventually after a long drawn out 'parade' of boats and floats around the harbour, including the Australian of the Year playing his part in the Queens Baton Relay for the Commonwealth Games. There was a good atmosphere but it was all a bit "aren't we wonderful" for my liking...

My last day in Sydney (Sunday 29th January) was great - Emma and I drove up to the Blue Mountains in her car, Sheila :-) It was a really good day, great to finally get out of the city and the mountains were well worth the visit. We stopped at Echo Point to see The 3 Sisters first:

Then on to Katoomba Scenic Railway, the steepest railway in the world (it was vertical part of the time!) to the bottom of the mountains, where we had a walk round to see parts of an old miners village and then got a cable car back up to the top... those of you who know how scared of heights I am will have an idea of how glad I was to be back on solid ground again!! A wander round the town of Katoomba then before taking the scenic route back to the city - with a small detour to the Minniehaha Falls... well someone was having a good old ha ha at sending all the tourists here anyway!!

Monday 30th January I finally waved goodbye to Sydney and flew to Melbourne, the hotel I was staying in was right in the CBD (Central Business District) so was a great base for a few days sightseeing. I didn't have very long there, only 2 1/2 days, but I packed quite a lot in - the free city circle tram came in very handy for getting my bearings and getting to a fair few of the main attractions. The Queen Victoria Markets were great, a huge market with deli, fruit & veg, fish & meat and general clothing/jewellery/souvenir sections, I spent quite a while wandering round there! The Acquarium was interesting, but quite overpriced I think. Federation Square in the city has some very bizarre buildings including a large video screen with live feed showing the goings on in the Square - probably the only time I'll ever see myself on the big screen! :-)

The Docklands is a new area of the city, recently renovated and now houses lots of restaurants and bars - and while I was there, a circus, which was a great show. Lots of sculptures around that area particularly, including this one...

What else... oh the Immigration Museum was really interesting, definitely well worth a visit. I also spent an afternoon in St Kilda, Melbourne's seaside suburb, which would have been better had it not been raining all day!

Thursday February 2nd I picked up my rental car, an orange Toyota Yaris I named Kath :-) Finally I was getting out on the road! I drove about half of the Great Ocean Road the first day, through Geelong which had lots of bizarre pieces like these dotted around the town...

... on to Torquay where I had a walk along Bell's Beach, which I had almost all to myself; then on through Anglesea and Airey's Inlet where I stopped at Split Point Lighthouse...

... on then to Lorne where I headed inland a little to Erskine Falls, which was a lovely spot...

... and finally on to Apollo Bay where I stayed the first night. The second day I drove on to the end of the Great Ocean Road, taking in a rainforest walk at Maits Rest and a trip out to the lighthouse and telegraph station at Cape Otway Lighthouse. Then I went to the Otway Fly Tree Top Walk, which is a steel bridge constructed 47 metres high so that you can walk among the treetops in the rainforest...

The cantilever was the most unsettling bit and though it was all very impressive I was very, very glad to be back in the car again!! I got caught up in a group of pensioners at one point (is there a name for a group of pensioners?!!) and overheard the funniest conversation I'd heard for a while - 2 ladies talking about one of the gents in the group... Lady #1: "He only retired a couple of months ago, didn't he?" Lady #2: "Yes. That's why he doesn't know the price of souvenirs yet!" Well it made me giggle :-)

On then to take in The 12 Apostles (though you can only see 7 of them from the boardwalk, to see all of them you need to take a helicopter flight) - it was very surreal standing there looking at something so familiar!

I stopped at a couple of other sights after that, like the Bay of Islands, and finished the day in Warrnambool. The third day, I drove through Port Fairy and on to Portland, and headed inland to The Grampians National Park. Unfortunately, I got as far as Hamilton where I stopped for a break and popped into the tourist office, where I was told that due to fire damage nearly all the park was closed to the public. Still, I decided to keep on in that direction and by-passed the park, but thoroughly enjoyed the drive to Horsham. There was a lot of not very much to see, but it was great to be out in the country, plenty of peace and quiet and no traffic!!

I drove straight on from Horsham to Adelaide the following day, the last 450km of the trip. Oh and I did see another 2 of Australia's 'big things' the last couple of days... the Big Wool Bales at Hamilton and The Giant Koala on the Western Highway - both utterly batty, as are the others!

I didn't do very much in Adelaide, I would have liked to get out to the Barossa Valley and the Whispering Wall but it was too late to book a tour for the only full day I had there. Mostly I just bummed around the city and took it easy, though I did go to Glenelg (Adelaide's seaside suburb) one day and also did a free tour of Haigh's chocolate factory which was really interesting. Even more interesting was the big handful of tasters they handed out at the end of the tour :-)

I went out to Kangaroo Island for 2 days, which was really great but really tiring, it's not even nearly enough time to spend on the island and I covered almost 650kms in 2 days. My first day there I'd been up at 5.30am to check in on time to get the coach to Cape Jervis, about 2 hours. Then a ferry over to the island, where I was picked up to go collect my hire car for the 2 days - a white Nissan Pulsar I called Kim ;-) Apparently I'd been upgraded but frankly I'd have preferred the Hyundai Getz I was supposed to have - the Pulsar was such a dull drive, didn't help that it was an automatic I suppose!! And have you ever tried driving on unsealed roads in one? Not fun!! Anyway, I digress... the first day I drove to Pardana in the centre of the island, then to the north where I visited Paul's Place, a wildlife park of sorts, basically it was Paul's farm... it was good but not really my cup of tea, I did get to hand feed Kangaroo Island kangaroos (they're a sub-species of the mainland kangaroos), hold a snake, see a koala, hear a kookaburra sing and stroke an echidna (as much as you can stroke a spiky creature like that :-) )... which was all good but having said that, I'd get much more of a kick out of seeing these animals in the wild, seeing them tame doesn't really interest me that much! That night I drove back out to Penneshaw on the north east tip of the island (where the ferry came in) to join the Penguin Walk tour. At other times of the year you can see up to 40-50 fairy penguins (little penguins up to only 30cm tall!) come in from the sea at night, but at this time of year they stay out at sea for several weeks to feed up, then come back to shore for about 3 weeks with no more food or water to grow a new set of feathers... so we only saw a few penguins venture out of their nests, but it was great to be able to see any at all!

The last day was great, I headed for Seal Bay first, which was fantastic. They bring guided tours down to the beach where we got to within about 10 metres of the seals, a wild colony of several hundred seals. I have to say that was the highlight of the whole trip, it was fascinating to be so close to them and the guide was great.

Unfortunately it rained for the rest of the day, but I drove to the south western tip of the island, to Flinders Chase National Park where I drove out to see the Remarkable Rocks, granite rocks which have been eroded over the years creating really spectacular shapes...

On then to Admiral's Arch, where I spent ages watching all the New Zealand fur seals on the rocks, again, a definite highlight of the trip!

On my way back to the hostel in Kingscote that night, I stopped briefly at Koala Walk, a path lined with eucalypts where you can usually spot a few koalas - I saw 4 in all, so was thrilled with that :-)

Soooo finally getting to the end of my trip! I arrived in Perth the evening of Friday 10th February and so far so good... first impressions are definitely better than Sydney, it seems a really nice place. I'm starting the job hunt today and I'm just going to play it by ear...

So that's it for now - keep your fingers crossed for me on the job/home front and I'll keep you up to date with my progress!

Miss you all

Gail xx

Hi everyone!

I know, I know, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this – again! So I’ve got a month or so to bring you all up to date on…

December was a bit of a non-event really, as I was sick with flu for most of it! The flu had been going round where I’d been working (reception at a security company) and I came down with it over the first weekend of the month. I called in sick on the Monday the agency rang later on that day to say the company had found someone to take on the reception role on a permanent basis, she was starting the next day so they didn’t need me anymore! To be honest I was quite relieved, for one I was too ill to work that week anyway, but as well as that I was SO bored there, reception can be sooo tedious! The agency managed to find me a great assignment for the next couple of weeks in the lead up to Christmas - part time hours and great pay, it would have been great… had I not had to take another couple of days off sick during the first week and understandably lost out on the rest of the assignment. I was away then most of the last week of December (more on that shortly) and thankfully found work pretty quickly after I got back – I started last Wednesday and found out yesterday that they want me to stay ‘til the end of the month, which fits perfectly into my plans. I’m just doing admin and I’ve had very little to do so far really, but I’m not going to complain tooo much because I have access to the internet and they’re paying me premium rate :-)

So, that’s what’s been happening work-wise! I had a really nice Christmas, I went up to family (Roberta, a cousin of Mum’s) living near Buderim (in Queensland, north of Brisbane). I hadn’t met them before, though Robert (Mum’s cousin living in Sydney) went up as well along with Leanne, a second cousin of mine who arrived over here just before I did. Robert drove up from Sydney over a couple of days but as I’d been expecting to work that week, I had booked a bus ticket to go up to Brisbane overnight, to arrive on Christmas Eve. I arrived in Brisbane after 17 hours on the bus! It wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting I have to say, but I really wouldn’t want to have to do it very often!! We did have three 40min stops along the way for breaks, but I have to say that at 3.30am, I’d have preferred to keep driving than to stop for a burger!! Our last stop was at the Big Prawn – it’s a standard rest stop except that there is a huge prawn on the roof… that really amused me, the first of Australia’s ‘big things’ I’ve seen :-)

Once I arrived in Brisbane, I then had another 2 hour bus trip to get from Brisbane to Buderim… I was a bit of a wreck when I finally arrived at Roberta’s :-) It was a really nice, relaxed Christmas, but very bizarre with the temperature at 37°C on Christmas Day!! Dinner was great and we stretched it out for most of the afternoon, started off with fantastic fresh prawns as is tradition here (people will queue for hours in the morning to get them!) and had dinner a bit later, the usual turkey & ham (except the turkey was cooked in the kettle barbeque) but with salads rather than sprouts :-) On St Stephen’s Day evening, I went to have another Christmas dinner with another family from back home – they are friends of my parents and Harriet was the teacher at my national school before they emigrated out here 17 years ago. We didn’t do a lot in our time in Queensland really, went for a couple of drives and to the beach once but we mostly just took it easy – it was too hot to want to do much anyway! Robert drove back to Sydney on the Wednesday & Thursday with myself and Leanne, we stopped over in Coffs Harbour overnight. It was still a good 7 hours driving each day, but somehow it didn’t seem like that much! Oh and we passed the Big Banana on the way too – admittedly not as impressive as the prawn :-)

We also stopped briefly in Surfers Paradise...

We arrived back in Sydney to find that it was hot and getting hotter… On New Year’s Day it was 44°C in the city and got up to 45°C near the airport, which made it Sydney’s hottest New Year’s Day on record, and the hottest day on record since 1939!! It was really unbearable I have to say, especially as we don’t have air conditioning in the house… thankfully it cooled down after that and I enjoyed a few blissful days of cloudy, rainy weather – I know that sounds weird but I was getting bored of it being sunny every day (the same way it’s boring when it’s raining every day!) and it had been too hot for my liking as well. It’s very humid here at the moment, which isn’t nice, but the temperature isn't high enough for it to be unbearable so I won’t complain too much!

My New Year celebrations were very uneventful I must admit – I did go down to the harbour in the evening of New Year’s Eve with the intention of watching the fireworks display at midnight, but it didn’t quite work out like that! I saw the 9pm fireworks from beside the bridge, but by then I had had enough of the crowds and the heat and was in a thoroughly foul mood, so I went home, put my feet up and happily watched it on tv instead!! I live less than 4km from the city, and heard it all very clearly – it was like my teeny telly had surround sound :-)

Let me see, what else… I met up with a lad from back home (Nigel) just before New Year, he’s in New Zealand at the moment but was over in Sydney for the holidays. He’s my brother’s friend’s brother- I’d only met him once before, ages ago, so I was a bit surprised to get a phone call from him as I didn’t even know he was over here :-) A few days after that, I got a text completely out of the blue from Emma, an old friend from school who I’d lost touch with after we left… and she’s over here as well! She’s travelling up the coast at the moment but one of the girls she’s with knows Nigel, he had mentioned to her that he’d met up with me in Sydney (I think she went to school with us too but not in my year, I don’t remember her) and she mentioned it to Emma! There really is an Irish grapevine over here :-) Anyway Emma’s planning to be back in Sydney this weekend and we’re hoping to meet up, so I’m really looking forward to catching up with her again.

As to my plans, well I have finally got my taxback and that along with a very unexpected cheque from Barclays has meant I am not in such dire financial straits anymore, which is a huge relief! So I’m going ahead with my original plan of leaving Sydney at the end of this month (under 3 weeks and counting!). I booked my flight to Melbourne, and my flight from Adelaide to Perth the other day, so now I just have to organise the bit in between :-) My plan is to spend 2-3 days in Melbourne, then hire a car and drive to Adelaide via the Great Ocean Road over 3-4 days. Then a couple of days in Adelaide, and a trip out to Kangaroo Island for couple of days before I fly on to Perth, arriving 10th February. I’m really looking forward to seeing a bit more of the country and to getting out of Sydney, I’ve been here long enough now I think! I haven’t made any plans after that, I’ll decide what to do when I get to Perth.

I suppose the biggest thing that’s happened since the last time I updated this is the dawning realisation that I want to go back to Ireland. It came as a bit of a shock at first I must admit, I mean I came over here thinking I would probably love it and not want to leave!! But so far at least I’m fairly indifferent to Australia… I like it well enough, but I don’t love it, and I haven’t been anywhere so far that makes me want to stay. Of course things may change when I get to other places, but this is how it stands at the moment. It feels right to go home when I’ve had enough here - at the moment I don’t see me being here for the full year, but we’ll see. I’m really looking forward to going home, but I do want to see at least a bit more of this country first. I’m just thoroughly fed up of temping, of contract jobs, and of moving about so much… I worked out that in the nearly 9 years since I left school, I’ve lived in 4 different countries, including 7 different towns/cities and 12 different houses/flats, and in the nearly 6 years since I left uni, I’ve done 9 different jobs in 4 different companies – not including the countless temp jobs!! Time for something a bit more secure methinks… and yes I’m surprised I’m saying it too :-)

Well I think that’s about all my news for now – I will try to update this again before I leave Sydney! Hope all is going well for you all – keep the emails and texts coming! :-)

‘Til next time
Gail xx

Hello all

Just a few photos from the weekend in Canberra...

This one is Parliament House:

This one was taken from Parliament House, the white building is Old Parliament House, and that's Anzac Parade behind that:

And finally, one of yours truly at Lake Burley Griffin, this was taken from the sculpture garden at the National Gallery:

Take care all, be in touch soon!

Gail x

Ok, ok, I know… sorry I’ve left it so long to update this!!

So let me see, what’s been happening… well I’m working anyway – on reception for a security company in Waterloo, in the eastern suburbs. I’m going to be here until Christmas, and possibly a little while after that, I’m not quite sure yet. It was a bit of a let down because I just missed out on getting a well paid 3 month Project Co-Ordinator role, and also missed out on an extremely well paid 2 week job… this job isn’t great money and it’s not exactly riveting work, but it’s something and at least I can rely on having work for the next few weeks. And they’re a good bunch of people here, so that helps too. My next step is to look for some evening work, 2 or 3 evenings a week if possible – I don’t want to end up doing the long hours I was doing when I was working two jobs earlier this year!

I have a new housemate since I last wrote too, and the atmosphere in the house is loads better now. I went down to Canberra with them this weekend – it was sooo good to have a change of scenery and get out of Sydney for a couple of days. Sargon was going there for a music retailer’s 10th anniversary party on the Sunday afternoon, so me and Daniela went along as well. It was a really nice afternoon – one of the people we were talking to was particularly interesting, he was once tour manager for Status Quo (and many others I’ve forgotten!) and was friends with the Beatles for many years… lots of stories!! The day Sargon was working, Daniela and I did the touristy thing and went to the National Gallery and Parliament House before making our way back to the city for a bit of shopping. Canberra is a very odd place – it doesn’t feel like a city at all! The city centre is really much more like a town centre (and not a big town centre at that) so it’s very strange to think this is Australia’s capital.

The only other new thing I’ve done is that I signed up for a 6 week beginners yoga class… I went to the second class last night and it was noticeably tougher than last week so I have a funny feeling I’m going to hurt even more next Wednesday!!! :-)

Other than that, to be honest, I’ve been living a very quiet life!! The weather’s still very unpredictable – for example yesterday it was lovely during the day, about 23°C and sunny and then there were thunderstorms last night… where’s the summer?!! :-) My main plan now is to try to sort out what I’m doing next – I’d really like to move on from Sydney (hopefully to Perth) and I’m hoping I can get enough money together to move on at the end of January - sooner if at all possible!

I’ll add some photos to this in the next couple of days…

Miss you all loads, keep in touch xx

Hi folks,

Well here are a few photos for you as promised... I haven't taken many as yet but I'm going to be here a while, and I'll take more as I go along!

I don't think these two landmarks need any introduction...

And this is Cockle Bay Wharf at Darling Harbour...

Well, that's it for now - speak to you all soon!

Gail x