It seems very strange. Three and a half months before I set off for New Zealand and i’ve booked two hostels! OK, one is for Sydney over Christmas and New Year so have to get in pretty early buy May?!? Crazy! Anyway, from late November to early Jan i’ll be staying at Kangaroo Bakpak in the Surry Hills area of Sydney. Only really passed that area on the bus so will be nice to stay there.
While I was in the booking mood I decided to book my fist hostel for New Zealand too – Verandahs Backpackers Lodge. It’s madness booking a hostel this early, but just feel the need to be doing something towards the trip. I’ll be glad when i’m back on the road and won’t think, or care about about booking into a hostel until the day before I head somewhere!
111 days to go and i’ll be climbing onboard Malaysian Airlines MH1, LHR to Auckland – if only the clocks could go forward a tiny bit faster…
Todays been a bit of a wet day, but the sun did appear for a few minutes just as it was setting and looked kinda nice. Not quite captured that, but it’s not too bad…
|
|
|
|
So, about this time yesterday I was wondering what to do on Monday as we have an extended weekend in the UK. I thought it might be nice to take a daytrip to the coast. This entails a 7hr roundtrip as I couldn’t really be more land locked but I thought it should be worth it.
Now I live in a town with a very part time ticket office in my local train station and buying over the internet, in advance, is supposed to be easier and cheaper so I went to book a ticket online. Big Mistake!!. I found the train times and checked them out to make sure there was enough time between connections and then worked my way though the absurd pricing structure.
They offer you the price of the return, well 4 or 5 different returns depending on if you want a saver return, super saver return, super cheap day return, etc… and then suggest you ignore that and check out the price of two singles as it maybe cheaper – why?!?… Anyway after eventually deciphering the pricing I get to the ticket delivery options and thats where everything grinds to a halt…
For some reason I don’t understand they don’t do e-tickets, and on a saturday afternoon they offer a same day delivery option for London customers only or you can pick your ticket up from a fast ticket machine which doesn’t exist at my station. So I was out of options for getting a ticket for Monday. After an email pointing out the problem of the delivery options and my part time ticket office they wrote back telling me to buy them from the ticket office that isn’t open! Very helpful of them…
I really don’t understand why they don’t offer e-tickets. I’ve booked journeys from my house to the otherside of the world and back all with e-tickets yet I can’t book a train journey from my local station to the coast and back for a day out on a public holiday!
So… Given up on that idea and I’m £40 better of as I can’t spend my money.
This weeks photo friday entry is for the theme “Home”. While walking near Manly last year I almost walked into this guys home!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Its a crappy rainy day here in the UK, as most Sundays seem to be! So, as something to do I was looking through some of my canada photos and came across some of the CN Tower
Now the major distinguishing feature of the CN Tower is it’s…. big! Very Big!! Being close up means that taking a photo of the entire thing is a bit of a pain and needs 4 or 5 shots. This i’d done and then forgotten about it. Now i’ve found them again i’ve stitched them together so the full height can be marvelled at!
There’s some nice distortion in the photo that make its look like its about to fall down, thankfully not in my direction!
For anyone wanting to stitch photos together then try AutoStitch. It produces some fantastic results and they’ve a nice gallery of stitched panoramic images
PhotoFriday is a weekly photo challenge, the idea being that you submit a photo for a particular theme. All fun, and you get to see a lot of decent photos.
|
|
16306 |
|
I’ve entered a few over the past few weeks avaliable here
This weeks is for the theme ‘The Road’ and is a photo I took near the surfing town of Margaret River, in Western Australia. I’d been meaning to take a photo of this very Australian road sign for many months but never got round to it until coming across this one.
If you’re ever on the road between Uluru and Kata Tuja in the Northern Territory look out for the same sign that’s been ‘edited’ with an alpine bent…
I’ve been doing a few things to gonewalkabout.info over the past few days.
Firstly, gonewalkabout.info got named as one of the April ‘users of the month’ over at clustrmaps. I have some more idea’s for the guestmap page too – just thinking about how to implement them.
Secondly both the postmap and photomap pages have been updated to use v2 of the google maps API! This should mean both sections now work across the majority of browsers including Safari and konqueror. I’m going to be working on both these over the coming days and there are a couple of minor issues but they’re worth it for the improved map resolution v2 of the API brings and the increased browser compatability.
Thirdly, i’m aware I have a lot of albums and subalbums in the gallery which can make navigation a bit of a pain, even if it keeps the images organised. In an attempt to help slightly i’ve added a navigation page which uses the ‘tree’ usually found in the gallery dropdown sidebar. I have some work todo tidying this up, but its working!
Finished! Phew… 
As we enter May 2006 I get closer to my next major Backpacking trip, which at the time of posting is only 135 days away!
The destination this time is New Zealand, and also a few months to revisit the fantastic country that is Australia. The half finished (baked) route at the moment looks something like this:
September 18th – November 7th: New Zealand (North Island – Auckland and the surrounding area)
November 7th – April 30th: Australia (Sydney-Melbourne-Sydney-East Coast-Alice Springs-Sydney)
I’ll be in Sydney over Christmas and New Year, so get in touch if you want to meet for a ‘few’ beers, have a sydney tour guide or a day at the beach
April 30th – ???? New Zealand (Rest of the North Island, onto the South Island and job hunting!)
More details are on the plans page.
Follow me on Twitter 