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I started this blog post sitting with feet up windows open breeze flowing in and still not quite believing that I’m actually back in London. I’m now finishing it at 3am in the morning, with the windows and doors locked watching the BBC news and counting my lucky stars that thanks to Jet lag I was in bed asleep when the terror events unfolded literally a few hundred metres from where I am on London Bridge and Borough Market, locations where I was only a few hours before.

I’m also not sure if this should really be three blog posts as it technically covers events over three days, but since I got zero sleep over the period, I’m counting it as one. I’ve had meals that I’m not really sure if they count as breakfast, lunch or dinner.

It all started on Friday morning, 10.15 Sydney time, we left for the airport and Sharon dropped me off at the check-in counter. Checking in was non eventful, as was moving through emigration and security. Of course being a male travelling by myself I was “randomly” picked to go through the extra super duper security checker. I’d left my phone in my pocket, so got to go through all that fun twice !

Bit of time to kill before getting on the plane so decided to check out the shops before grabbing my final Oz coffee. Noticed Tim Tams were super expensive, at around $6.50 a packet. I Had already stocked up from Coles to keep all the expats in the office happy, only $1.50 there. Will be brining so UK treats home on my return. Bought and drank my coffee, considering the shafting on the Tim Tams, only $1 more the the city wasn’t too bad really. Stocked up on a few last minute things and waited for the plane.

The trip to Hong Kong was pretty good, Sat next to a nice mum/daughter combo who were going to drive around Scotland for two weeks and chatted to them for a while. Food on plane was ok, but totally devastated that there was no wifi. I think this 777 plane getting a little long in the tooth with Cathay Pacific.

Arrived HK. More security and health checks found gate, then lounge. The lounge was really disappointing as seems to every credit card company uses the same one and they let anyone in willing to spend $30. Glad I get me credit card for free, wouldn’t be worth the annual $300 fee otherwise. Best thing about HK airport was the rubber duck display made out of tinned food. Quite interesting.

Flight to London was very long and dull, delayed over an hour out of Honkers due to some weather issues. I’m reminded yet again how much I hate night flights. A night in Asia wasn’t really an option as I had to be in london on Monday morning for the conference and wanted to spend as much of weekend in London as I could. A case of suck it up princess…

Of course I can’t sleep on planes and managed about 1hr max dozing on and off. That just wasn’t working so I switched strategies and started mainlining coffee as often as I could, listening to music and watching a movie for the rest of the flight. Movie was Hidden Figures, interesting story about a group of African American women who did all the trajectory calculations for NASA during the space race.

Set up my phone with my UK sim in it so I would be all ok for arrival, filled out all the paperwork for immigration and custom checks. Cathay Pacific dropped the ball a little on breakfast, i thought they were really cutting it tight, the flight tracker said we had less than an hour to go and they were still handing them out, then there seemed to be a crazy rush to get it all cleaned up virtually seconds before we landed.

I can see why come consider Gatwick to be the poor cousin to Heathrow, its old and was a bit of a rabbit warren to get to the immigration and customs area. One bonus was that it was quiet with virtually no one there so we all cruised through in a few minutes.

Gatwick had two portraits of the queen, all made out of tiny pictures of other UK citizens. Interesting and well done. After customs, bought a GBP20 express ticket for the train to Victoria station. Only waited a minute or two for it to arrive and was whisked into London faster than you can say Jiminy Cricket. Closest station is “Monument” but since there is track work on the District and Circle line, it was closed today. The next best option was “Bank” station. The apartment was super easy to find after walking out from the station, its right next door to that massive “Walkie Talkie” building, so didn’t even need to look at a map to find it.

Checkin guy was running late, but they had a system where I could get the key from a safe in the lobby, so did that, had a shower and walked up to the office where my London colleagues work. They were in the office today running a test so I dropped in to say hi and drop off some Tim Tams. The walk to the office goes right past my favourite London building, the “Gherkin”. Walked to Liverpool station and took a train to Euston to pick up some tickets I’d pre-purchased for my day trips to Bletchley and Manchester.

I had a 2.30pm appointment at the Lego store to try out the portrait maker, so jumped on a train to Leicester Square. Walking around noticed Bakewell tarts for sale, had never had one, but seen them on the show “Great British Bakeoff” so was keen to try one.

The Lego store in London is just awesome, lots of hard to get stuff plus a few exclusives you can’t get anywhere else.

After finishing here I took a train to London Bridge and walked down to Borough Market to grab some lunch. Was intending to get a coffee from Monmouth Coffee, but there was a massive queue. I noticed a vendor selling cups of Pimms, so had one of those instead. Very refreshing on a warm day. Borough Market is a foodies dream, so much on offer. I really just wanted something plain, and almost had trouble just finding a beef burger. On my way out of the market I picked up a couple of punnets of strawberries for 2 pounds.

Such a fantastic sunny day, I walked down to the Shard building and took the lift up to the viewing station for some pictures. Not cheap at GBP25, but worth it if its a clear day. Would be nice if they kept the glass a little cleaner though.

Walked back to apartment across London bridge, and by this time of day I was fighting to keep my eyes open, so just called into Tesco’s, picked up a pre-made curry for dinner, started on this post and was in bed pushing out ZZZZs by 7pm.  I woke up at around 1.30am and couldn’t get back to sleep so decided to check FB, and saw that I had quite a few messages and it was clear that something big was happening in London with another terror attack. No chance of getting more sleep now. I’ve planned for a trip out to Bletchley Park for Sunday, at this point I’m not sure if the stations will be open or if I’ll be able to get there.

This Wednesday just past I headed down to the Needles with the 100 Candles fitness group. The Needles is a spot on the Woronora river just behind Engadine. A fantastic spot that’s very popular with locals for swimming. The dam upstream has a constant flow through system so there is always some water flowing through this section and its very clean. The water is very deep in sections.

It’s approx. a 2km walk down from the closest road on the Engadine side of the ridge. A rather brutal walk back up the hill on the return, the total elevation drop from the road is about 150m.

 

 

I’ll start this post off saying I really wanted to love these. I ordered them the day they were available online for pre-order, and I finally received them two weeks ago on the 7th. I picked them up when I was last at Westfield Miranda. I waited this long to write about them as they were not quite what I expected.

Some people don’t like the fit of Apple earphones, however they suit me, so I was very keen to get a wireless pair. After unpacking them and pairing them with my iPhone 6S+, the sound kept dropping out every few seconds. The pairing with the phone was easy, just as Apple describe it. You open the case and they appear on your phone. I did think the sound drops may be due to the number of bluetooth items I own, so I gave them a day or so more of testing in various scenarios. They never improved, even dropped and hung up on conference calls when I was in the office.

I’d tried everything I could think of, re-pairing, switching off all other bluetooth and radio devices to no avail. On the third night I chatted with Apple support in Austin, Texas. Ran through all the same things I’d already done, which of course made no difference. The lady on the chat line booked me in for an appointment at the Apple Store in Sydney a week later (Apple service appointments are getting harder and harder to book…)

Turned out to be the worst Apple Genius appointment I’d ever had, at first they were surprised I had brought in AirPods, as the other support person had actually booked me in for a phone issue. The Genius also hadn’t ever used AirPods, so I really ended up demonstrating to him how they worked. Of course nothing could be done about the issue and in the noisy environment it was hard to hear anything through them at all. Apple didn’t have any spares I could swap with.

In the end I was fed up with them, Apple charge a premium for products that are supposed to “just work” and these clearly didn’t. At A$220 a pair, they have to be perfect and since I was in my two week return period, I just told them to process it as a return. This is thus the first Apple product I’ve every returned for my cash back.

It didn’t quite end here, after a service appointment Apple send you a link for a survey on your appointment. Of course I left a scathing review of the product in that survey and yesterday Apple called me back to discuss it. Since I’ve returned them, Apple did release a firmware update and they are going to reserve a new set for me in store and call when they arrive. I’ll give them a second shot since the returns process is quite simple. Only time will tell.

 

 

 

 

We headed down to Callala Beach this weekend to celebrate my Mum’s Birthday. Callala Beach is a wonderful spot on Jervis Bay, one of the most beautiful places in Australia with amazing white sands and very calm waters. It’s only a two hour drive south of Sydney. The only real downside of Callala Beach is that since its so quiet and reasonably isolated, there are no Cafes and restaurants there. Husskison is the closet larger town and has quite a few, although its only about 4km away from Callala, its still a 25 minute drive away as there is no bridge across the river thats close enough.

We popped into Huskisson on Saturday to pick up a cake, catchup with some friends competing in the Husky Triathlon there and grab a coffee. We grabbed the cake and coffee from the “Huskisson Bakery & Cafe”.

For my coffee hits the rest of the weekend I had to rely on the Nespresso machine in the house. Unfortunately there was a coffee van at Myola for a few hours on Sunday (a few minutes in the car from Callala Beach) but I missed it.

Heading back to Sydney on Monday we stopped in Berry and grabbed a coffee from “The Hub of Berry” when having lunch.

Today was the first Saturday morning in the SHINE fitness program I’m doing with 100 Candles. A nice walk from the helipad at Greenhills beach at Cronulla down to South Cronulla beach and back. Of course no morning run or walk would be complete without a coffee, so we stopped at the Wanderer’s Cafe for some breakfast before returning home. Being there so early in the morning I was able to grab a few sunrise shots. Nice little reminder of what a fantastic part of the world we live in. Returned home before the searing heat of January set in.