Three days to go

People back home seem to see Australia as a never-ending funland – a once in a lifetime place to go. Having been down here three times in as many months, it doesn’t really hold the same attraction for me any more. Don’t get me wrong – Sydney is great, but Canberra gives off a certain air [...]

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John Travolta in a dress – who would have thunk it?

When you’re not interested in shopping, Saturdays on the road can really drag. You can’t hang around your hotel room all day, because at some stage the staff have to reconstruct everything. So what do you do? Well, during the week I had constructed an elaborate plan culminating in a return to Batemans Bay down on [...]

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Strange how I feel like I’m on shift work

Back when I was in college, I spent a summer packing boxes and moving pallets in a factory in Kildare. The job involved shift work, and so for one week in every three my working day began at 11pm and kept going through 7am. It’s a strange feeling knowing that most people are at home [...]

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Bondi Beach is another world

After a late night in Sydney on Friday, I decided to skidaddle to the seaside on Saturday morning to let the salt air blow away the cobwebs. So where better to go than Bondi – especially as it was shaping up to be quite a nice day.

Anyways – there I am, pasty faced and not exactly [...]

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So it’s goodbye to Wellington

I like Wellington. It’s a nice compact city, there are some great Indian restaurants and it has a pretty dramatic backdrop of mountains with the city pressed into the shoreline and up the slopes. But it’s Friday already and time to head for Sydney. For the unitiated northern hemisphere reader, New Zealand is actually a long [...]

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Flying with a headcold

Thanks to the folks at Business & Finance, via my sister Emer, I got to make friends with the flu last week. Of course, being a hardy bit of stuff, a sniffle doesn’t normally mean it’s the end of the world, and time to come clean before I meet my maker. But, I did have some [...]

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From the bottom of the world…..

So here I am in Wellington again. It seems that my curse this year is to keep one step ahead of any pleasant weather. No sooner had the sun finally popped out back home, then I was off down to a windy New Zealand spring. Still – anything beats -35C in Edmonton last February [...]

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