Melbourne Loft

I’m in Phuket in Thailand with my family now having a great time. We all got rooms that walk down in to a great swimming pool. This shot was taken with my new Lumix underwater camera. It’s been taking some great photos so I’ll post a lot more here shortly.

I was really disappointed that I wasn’t in Australia for the AFL grand final today. It would have been so nice to see Geelong kick Collingwood’s arse. The AFL grand final is enormous in Melbourne. Victorians are crazy for AFL and lately I’ve found myself becoming much more interested in the game. I still have no idea of how the game actually works.
Anyway, I flew in to Bangkok with my family last night. We’ve done loads of walking today and now I’m chilling out back in my room catching up on some email. I’ll post some pics from the trip here soon.

Busy day today. It’s the first day of my vacation and I’m heading to Brisbane to meet my family. We are taking a trip to Thailand together to celebrate my sister’s 50th birthday and to have a little vacation together. So I’m up before 5am to get myself to the airport. There are strikes at Qantas today so hopefully my domestic flight to Brisbane will be on time. I’m really looking forward to seeing my family. It’s been ages since I last saw them. Also, it will be my Dad’s first trip out of the country. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’ll post some updates along the way.

The Lumix range of Panasonic cameras have been pretty good to me for my travel needs. So when my Lumix DMC-FT1 broke down recently I decided to simply buy the most current model of it. The FT3 has Full HD video, GPS and most importantly, the start up is much much faster. In a recent DPReview.com review they rated this as the best overall under water camera. I justified the purchase because I’m going to Thailand with my family in 2 weeks, and there will be a lot of pool time there. And it can withstand the freezing conditions in Europe at Christmas time. It’s a really good all rounder. I was going to buy it cheaper from an online store, but at the last minute decided to get it at JB HiFi who always seem to do good deals on cameras for me.

Okay. So by now you would have realised that our Europe trip will take a side step to New York. It wasn’t intentionally planned this way. But it did teach me that it’s actually often cheaper to take a flight to Europe and buy a side trip to the US than buy a round the world ticket from Australia. In fact it was significantly cheaper. So we’ll be back in London early in January and of course, I hope it will be snowing there too! But I’m told it’s more likely to be cold and rainy. In London we are booked to stay at this well placed Hyatt. Since we have a longer break there this time I’m hoping we will see a lot more than we saw during our 3 nights stay there last year.

Bet you didn’t see that one coming! Yes… we’ll be in New York for New Year’s Eve. That should be a lot of fun. And I really hope it snows while we are there. I love New York and can’t wait to catch up with my friends there. To make sure we get everything in we’ll be staying there for a week. This will be a side trip from London with BA/AA.

I think this will be my 6th visit to Berlin. It has to be in my top 5 cities in the world. I’d love to be able to live there sometime. I don’t think I could go to Europe without visiting Berlin. In Berlin we are going to stay at the fairly new Axel Hotel. I usually stay at a guesthouse in Berlin. But this hotel is a bit closer to the action. It looks pretty nice too. I really hope we get some snow while we are there.

Recently Qantas announced that they will terminate their London bound flights via Bangkok at Bangkok and British Airways will terminate their Sydney bound flights via Bangkok, at Bangkok. They will push passengers on to the other airline at Bangkok airport. So we will be travelling on BA via Bangkok in December/January. But they haven’t announced yet when this new arrangement will start. I’m kinda hoping it will be in affect when we fly. That way we can be travelling on both airlines during the trip. And hopefully on the new A380 with Qantas. That would be so cool! So I’ll keep checking, but at the moment it is still BA all the way.

So we have booked our first place to stay on the Europe trip in December. We got a great deal at the Sofitel at “Chainbridge”. It seems to be parked alongside a beautiful river. We are actually only staying here for 3 nights. But it will give us a chance to have a little look around.

Now that the flights for the the Europe/New York trip are all booked the next step is to find places to stay. We have already booked hotels in Budapest and Berlin. For New York, London and Paris we’d like to find apartments to stay in, and hopefully cut down the accommodation costs. New York is proving to be very difficult to find something nice and at a reasonable price. I really like this site AirBNB.com. But so far we haven’t found any we agree on. As a back up I already have a booking at the guesthouse in Chelsea where I have stayed before. We will be in New York over New Year’s Eve, so it’s important we book quickly for that busy period.
This loft in SoHo would be very nice!