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Post by plane2catch on Nov 24, 2015 0:41:27 GMT
Tulips, I actually am happy when I am on a tour with 25 people. Sometimes it seems to take forever for larger groups to board the coach even when both doors are in use.
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Post by plane2catch on Nov 24, 2015 0:48:13 GMT
Hey Chech, are you planning on posting all of your pics of this trip on your lesleyanneryan website?
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Pauline
Full Member
Normandy, Brittany & the Loire Valley, WW1 Battlefields and Northern Spain in Sep 2023 with Insight
Posts: 210
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Post by Pauline on Nov 24, 2015 11:23:48 GMT
Chech, I'm enjoying your tale of Australia. You have seen more of it that I have and I live here. I only found this forum yesterday. I was overseas last year when Trafalgar closed their BB, so never saw the notice about this Forum opening. I haven't started on any of the other tour tales yet. I'll be in travel readers heaven for quite a while. Hi Pauline, It's great to see you back on-line as another seasoned traveller from the defunct Trafalgar forum Rosemary Hi Rosemary, I'm also from the original Insight Forum. I was on the Insight BB tour of Poland in 2014, when Trafalgar pulled the plug and as luck would have it, John Boulding (Insight's CEO) was on the tour with us. Some people on the tour knew that the Trafalgar forum had been closed and John was told by many of the people on the tour, that if Insight did the same, they would lose some regular travellers. Mind you, in the overall scheme of things, losing a few travellers wouldn't really make much of an impact. Insight did close their old Forum but at least they left it there as an online read only website. Their new Forum website is not as user friendly as the old one though. Many hiccups and some still haven't been fixed 12 months later.
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Post by chech on Nov 25, 2015 12:14:44 GMT
Day Ten is up. And yes, when I'm done with the tale, I'll start uploading the photos to flickr.
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Pauline
Full Member
Normandy, Brittany & the Loire Valley, WW1 Battlefields and Northern Spain in Sep 2023 with Insight
Posts: 210
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Post by Pauline on Nov 25, 2015 12:37:37 GMT
Love the tale and the photos Chech . Looking forward to seeing all the pics on Flickr, when you post them there.
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Post by purvis on Nov 25, 2015 14:58:28 GMT
What an amazing tour tale. I guess there weren't many in field training exercises in the Canadian army at 40 plus temps. Don't know much about sunstrokes but doubt that they are not much fun. Purvis
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Post by 1jhwks on Nov 25, 2015 23:55:43 GMT
Day Ten is up. And yes, when I'm done with the tale, I'll start uploading the photos to flickr. And deliver she did! But I was disappointed that theren't any pics of the night time sky in the tale!!!! Can't wait to see those!
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Post by chech on Nov 26, 2015 0:48:21 GMT
What an amazing tour tale. I guess there weren't many in field training exercises in the Canadian army at 40 plus temps. Don't know much about sunstrokes but doubt that they are not much fun. Purvis We did exercises in Wainwright and Shilo in both summer and winter so I got to do it in -40 and +40...but somehow, it was easier to handle at 22 than it is at 50. I have about twenty pounds of extra insulation that I didn't have back then.
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Post by chech on Nov 26, 2015 0:52:09 GMT
I'm furiously working on Day Eleven, but by gosh, Alice Springs has so much to offer...! And I'm still chasing fur!! Holy cow, how much fur can a dog shed in a year! So, Day Eleven will be delivered on Friday morning.
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Post by Oz-T on Nov 26, 2015 2:25:56 GMT
I'm enjoying reading this, especially as you're covering some places I visited over the last 12 months.
The dolphin shape you saw from the plane shortly before landing at Yulara is a small saltpan that's beside the Lasseter Highway, not far from the Mount Conner lookout. We drove past there a year ago, oblivious to the fact that from the air it looked like a dolphin's head.
The lookout near the Olgas on Day 10 is the spot where we were almost knocked over by a 'dust devil' mini tornado while I was taking photos. We found the going very tough when we walked into Walpa Gorge, but that was late November and perhaps slightly hotter than your day (but whether it's 44C or 46C, does it really matter?).
Like you, we learned how important it was to take more water than you think you need - it's incredibly deceiving how much your requirements are. We walked the entire base of Uluru and by late morning it was really difficult on flat terrain - even two litres of water each had run out just before we finished.
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Post by chech on Nov 26, 2015 13:16:03 GMT
LOL...yeah..if it starts with a 4, it's ruddy hot! And then add in wearing the fly net...I was just baking my scalp. Given my time back, I would have bought a Camelbak so that I could have had a couple litres in my bag and a couple of spare bottles in the pouches.
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Post by chech on Nov 27, 2015 12:52:56 GMT
A long Day Eleven is up. Just to note....there are pics of lizards and snakes. <I've removed the snake pics until Monday>
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Post by plane2catch on Nov 27, 2015 15:55:50 GMT
Love that Thorny Devil Pic.
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Post by purvis on Nov 27, 2015 16:30:25 GMT
Chech: Glad you warned us about the reptiles as I'm terrified of snakes even pictures of them so I guess I'll just skip reading day 11. See your tales when day 12 is up. Puvis
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Post by chech on Nov 27, 2015 18:06:41 GMT
Tell ya what....I've removed the two snake pics for a couple days so that you guys can read it no problem. I'll put them back after the weekend.
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Post by chech on Nov 28, 2015 12:08:53 GMT
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Post by plane2catch on Nov 28, 2015 13:52:47 GMT
Shrine of Remembrance?? What are they remembering, WW2?
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Post by purvis on Nov 28, 2015 17:58:00 GMT
Chech: Thanks for temporarily removing the snake pictures. I just finished reading days 11-12 and really wish you had added a picture of Mr. & Mrs. OZ . I'm sure you were delighted to have met Mr. Oz after so many years of chatting online. Was surprised to see that Melbourne was so big. I will never get to Australia so your tour tale of this trip is very educational. Thanks. Purvis
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Post by chech on Nov 28, 2015 18:27:17 GMT
Shrine of Remembrance?? What are they remembering, WW2? Most of the memorials we saw remembered all involvment in the last hundred years.
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Post by chech on Nov 28, 2015 18:29:52 GMT
Chech: Thanks for temporarily removing the snake pictures. I just finished reading days 11-12 and really wish you had added a picture of Mr. & Mrs. OZ . I'm sure you were delighted to have met Mr. Oz after so many years of chatting online. Was surprised to see that Melbourne was so big. I will never get to Australia so your tour tale of this trip is very educational. Thanks. Purvis Cool. Alice Springs was an educational stop that spoke volumes about Australia in general. I really enjoyed it. I thought one of the reflections in the Edge pics was him but it wasn't...he was off to my right. The man in the pic was standing behind me taking pics.
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Post by solaria on Nov 28, 2015 20:05:19 GMT
Melbourne is my favourite city! We first went there for our 20th anniversary and my 40th birthday. Pavarotti sang to me (and a few others) at the Tennis Centre on the night of my day! We also saw Phantom of the Opera for the first time. The Eureka tower is great and I don't like heights. Did you go see the the Hall of Rembrance and thed gardens? Both very beautiful.
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Post by chech on Nov 28, 2015 22:02:47 GMT
Yeah...I really liked Melbourne and as you'll see for Day 13, I could have arranged my optionals and spent more time in the city. Oz did such a great job on his version of the city tour, I really didn't need to do the one the next morning and I could have opted for just the Penguin Parade and skipped the zoo, giving me most of the day in the city....but hindsight is 20/20. I did visit Fitzroy Gardens and the Shrine of Remembrance on the next day with the morning tour....both I could have walked to from my hotel.
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Post by Oz-T on Nov 28, 2015 22:13:47 GMT
And what a fun evening it was, meeting Chech and showing her around Melbourne. I'm still unsure about that big case she arrived at the hotel with, but we will assume that no cats had been smuggled into Australia to accompany her. As we know, those cats do like adventures. So now Chech can appreciate what the long-suffering Mrs Oz (and any fellow tour group members) have to endure. There's nothing wrong with having a bit of fun and a laugh, even if Mrs Oz says there are limits I regularly ignore. Readers will be interested to hear about a scientific discovery I made during Chech's visit. I call it cat radar. It's a syndrome whereby a person instantly tunes into invisible feline wavelengths being emitted throughout a city. Any poster, billboard, sign etc emits these wavelengths, but 99.9% of the population cannot detect them. Chech happens to be within that 0.1%. In fact, I suspect she has a detecting range of a couple of km's but there was insufficient time to test this out and I was fearful of taking her through Melbourne's Chinatown district in case there was an overload of signals coming from the restaurants there. As time was limited, we thought the Eureka Tower observation deck was the best way to see most of the city in one hit; the views are pretty good and you can see across Port Phillip Bay toward the city of Geelong. Unsurprisingly, Chech lingered with that view, unaware that Geelong's football team are known as The Cats (see, cat radar is subliminal!). And just over to the east she was looking over Richmond, and the Melbourne Cricket Ground, home to my football team, the Richmond Tigers. I try to remain discreet about my closet cat interests.... Alas, the evening finished far too soon as I still had a few hundred more jokes and gags. But Mrs Oz would have been frowning and saying that enough was enough. So we left Chech and made our way home, never noticing any cat things all the way home. I'm definitely in the 99.9% CATegory. Glad you had a great time, Chech, and I'm enjoying the travel tale.
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Post by chech on Nov 28, 2015 23:22:39 GMT
Baaaaaaaaaaahahahahahaha! OMG...my ribs still hurt. So there was a reason you chose Italian over Chinese...ah ha! I still chuckle over the times you'd be talking and both of you are walking along and I'm stopped five metres behind you taking a pic of the most obscure cat reference. The odd thing is I never came across so many cat references anywhere else in Australia. And the only live cat I saw was in Fiji. The big case just arrived back via sea container(s). I'm pretty sure there are no cats left in Australia now.
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Post by tassiedevil on Nov 29, 2015 10:46:06 GMT
Shrine of Remembrance?? What are they remembering, WW2? It was originally built as a memorial to the men and women of Victoria who served in World War I and is now a memorial to all Australians who have served in war from the Boer War until now.
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Post by tassiedevil on Nov 29, 2015 11:06:33 GMT
The odd thing is I never came across so many cat references anywhere else in Australia. And the only live cat I saw was in Fiji. You didn't see the advertising for Cats (the musical) in Hobart? Thankfully a lot of people here keep their cats locked away to help protect the wildlife. As the popular saying here goes, the only good cat is a dead cat.
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Post by chech on Nov 29, 2015 13:14:10 GMT
LOL...no, never saw the Cats ad there. I thought it was "the only good possum is roadkill" And "The only good cat is an indoor cat!"
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Post by chech on Nov 29, 2015 13:15:27 GMT
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Post by purvis on Nov 29, 2015 16:50:30 GMT
Chech Was enlightened by your info on the penguins. I thought they only lived in much colder climates in the wild. Didn't know that they came in colours different from white and black. Thanks for the wildlife education. Purvis
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Post by chech on Nov 29, 2015 16:56:51 GMT
Aren't they cute? I've seen penguins as far north as Peru. They were on the Ballesta Islands. Adrian told us there are about forty species of penguins and only half of them live in Antarctica. I've now seen penguins in Australia, New Zealand, Peru, southern Chile and South Africa. Given all the ice I see every winter, I now have no real reason to go to Antarctica. (Which is why I'm doing the Arctic cruise instead)
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