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Sofies on tour: Kyoto

It was our first full day in Kyoto, and boy did we smash it. I hadn’t anticipated to do so much walking, but by the end of the day we had covered over 22km, and 31,000 steps. We were tired, exhausted, and our legs felt like they were going to drop off.

But we got to see a lot of great things, and that’s the point of travelling right?

We started off the day by walking the backstreets following my Apple Watch as it tried to lead us to the food markets we had researched. For future reference, the GPS quality in the back streets is not so great, so it did result in a couple of missed turns on our part while it was working out where we were. Running the GPS on the phone through to the watch also massively eats at the battery life, and so by just after lunch I was running at 50%. I opted to just go straight from the phone then and put my watch on aeroplane mode. [...]  read more

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Sofies on tour: Tokyo to Kyoto

Today was the first “real” day of our holiday so to speak, meaning that it was time for us to explore!

We started things off by having our last “western” breakfast at the restaurant downstairs and jumping on the hotel bus to Tokyo station. We had forgotten to exchange our rail pass the day before, so before we could jump in the train we needed to first find the rail office.

What…a….mission.

We thought it would be as simple as finding a Japan Rail office and swapping it. Not so. The first place we tried directed us to another, then the second sent us into some scary tunnels that looked like we were leaving the country. It turned out it was just a lot of renovation work they were doing, and thankfully we kept going to discover it popped us right out in front of the office we needed. Third time lucky we exchanged the passes, reserved a seat of the train and made our way to the platform. [...]  read more

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Sofies on tour: Australia to Japan

Well, we’ve made it! Today was all about the travel, and the process of getting here. Mario doesn’t fly too well so we booked into a hotel near the airport so that he could get to bed pretty early without fuss. Tomorrow we will be travelling by bullet train to Kyoto, so there will be lots of exciting news to report in!

To recap today’s events:

Booking our flights

The downside to booking flights with Qantas is that we couldn’t choose our seats until we had booked our flights, which I had found a bit annoying (unless I did it wrong). Unfortunately all the seats in the exit rows had already been taken, which meant that Mario would have to sit in one of the regular seats. The challenge with that is that he’s 6ft 4, which means for him flying is awkward at best due to the lack of leg room. [...]  read more

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Adios Australia – we are off to Japan!

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After what can only be described as the most whirlwind week of my life, we are off on our honeymoon! The wedding is done and dusted, and it’s now time to kick back and relax with each other to celebrate the start of our wedded life together.

I plan to write about the wedding while on the plane to recap all the events , but images will be a little scarc. I’m banking on the fact that my friends love me enough to steal their images, with full credit of course 🙂 It will be about 8 weeks before we get any official images back from our photographer, but based on the sneak peeks that’s I’ve seen they promise to be spectacular! [...]  read more

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Camping trip to Stradbroke Island

Hammock at Stradbroke Island

Yesterday the other half, my dog and I got home from an amazing 6 days up at the beach, camping at Stradbroke Island. I won’t lie, while I had a great time I was beyond stoked to get home. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of a flushing toilet, a shower, a comfortable bed, hard floors and not having to sweep your feet every 30 seconds when you jump inside to get something.

The shower I had that night was the best shower I’ve had. Ever.

You don’t even know.

Mario spent his days fishing, and caught a few whiting and something else. I would tell you, but to be honest I didn’t pay attention. I was very excited for him for catching something, but given I don’t eat fish I wouldn’t know the difference between whiting and trout (although if he’d told me he’d caught a shark I would be very impressed albeit freaked out). He managed to run out of bait while we were there, so we went into town and bought more on the second last day. In the end he didn’t use all of the refill, so we gave the leftovers to some friends he had made while fishing (they had nearly managed to hook a stingray but the line broke at the last second and it got away). [...]  read more