November 1
10:15am - Caught city bus (TriMet) to downtown Portland (cost: $1.25)
12:30am - Caught Bolt Bus from Portland to Seattle (cost: $3.00 - including credit card fee)
3:45pm - Caught Sound Transit light rail from Seattle Amtrak station to Seattle airport ($3.00)
6:35pm - United flight from Seattle to Los Angeles (2 1/2 hours)
10:30pm - United flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne (16 hours)
November 2 - Never lived because flight crossed international date line
November 3
8:30am - Arrived Melbourne (time in Los Angeles: November 2 - 2:30pm)
Watched 3 movies and slept some on flight from Los Angeles -- and arrived tired but excited to be starting a new adventure. Picked up local sim card for iphone ($23USD for 6 gigs of data) and got some local Australian dollars from ATM. Then easily found Sky Bus to downtown ($19 Australian, about $15 US) and free tram to my AirBnB home for the next 3 nights ($54 a night - including all fees/taxes). This AirBnB will be perfect spot to visit the city as it is within the free tram zone of the city (Melbourne has the world's largest tram network: 493 trams on 25 routes with 1763 stops) and just a block from one of Melbourne's top attractions: Queen Victoria Market.
After meeting one of my AirBnB hosts and dropping my backpack, I proceeded to the Queen Victoria Market and enjoyed both my stroll and my lunch -- picking up a soup/salad to eat at nearby tables. Seeing no empty table, I asked a couple if I could join them in the beautiful afternoon sunshine -- around 70 degrees -- and enjoyed a delightful conversation with the couple who were tourists from northern Italy. In their broken English, they gave me a local map and instructed me on how one of the trams routes (35) is specifically designed for tourists -- giving a free audio tour as it circled the city. Once again, as is so often in my travels, conversations with others start easily and provide helpful information. After lunch I proceeded on the free tram and got an overview of this very gorgeous city on a very gorgeous spring day (yes, November is the last month of spring in this southern hemisphere city).
Not sure how much I'll blog this trip. I'm thinking I might start using Instagram to post photos and give a brief update. If you are an Instagram user, feel encouraged to find me there with my motorcycling-inspired moniker "BackRoadRider."
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Budget Wanderlusting - Down Under
Summary: Yep! Another blog start! I'm headed to Australia from November 1 to 17. My roundtrip United Airlines ticket cost $573, and I'm:
flying roundtrip from Seattle to Melbourne,
visiting a cousin I've never met,
visiting the property once owned by my great grandfather before he moved the family to USA,
driving about 1000 miles along the "Great Ocean Road" south of Melbourne and continuing up along the coast to Sydney (Google map here),
staying at AirBnB's along the way.
Details: It was last April 2016 that I received email notice from scottscheapflights.com alerting me to inexpensive flights from the USA's west coast to and from certain cities in Australia. Since I had never been to Australia -- and it was high on my bucket list -- I did some quick research -- and ended up booking flights from Seattle to Melbourne with a return from Sydney. Having heard that Australia can be expensive traveling -- I limited this first-ever trip to Australia to just two weeks in country departing November 1 but arriving November 3 because of dateline and travel time, and returning November 17.
Why so cheap? I don't really know except that I thought that perhaps United was attempting to fill up it's newest Boeing 787's Dreamliners that I'll be taking to and from Australia -- but "Scott" of scottscheapflights.com opined in our correspondence exchange that it might have been a competitive move by United to match what were likely "mistake" fares by Delta and Virgin Australia the prior week:
flying roundtrip from Seattle to Melbourne,
visiting a cousin I've never met,
visiting the property once owned by my great grandfather before he moved the family to USA,
driving about 1000 miles along the "Great Ocean Road" south of Melbourne and continuing up along the coast to Sydney (Google map here),
staying at AirBnB's along the way.
Details: It was last April 2016 that I received email notice from scottscheapflights.com alerting me to inexpensive flights from the USA's west coast to and from certain cities in Australia. Since I had never been to Australia -- and it was high on my bucket list -- I did some quick research -- and ended up booking flights from Seattle to Melbourne with a return from Sydney. Having heard that Australia can be expensive traveling -- I limited this first-ever trip to Australia to just two weeks in country departing November 1 but arriving November 3 because of dateline and travel time, and returning November 17.
Why so cheap? I don't really know except that I thought that perhaps United was attempting to fill up it's newest Boeing 787's Dreamliners that I'll be taking to and from Australia -- but "Scott" of scottscheapflights.com opined in our correspondence exchange that it might have been a competitive move by United to match what were likely "mistake" fares by Delta and Virgin Australia the prior week:
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