travel – dangermouse.net

Planning for cherry blossoms

I slept in a bit this morning, but then got up, had breakfast, and embarked on a 5k run. The weather was far too warm and humid, and it was a real struggle today, with a slow time. But at least I have the virtue of doing some exercise regardless.

Last night while I was watching a movie on Netflix (The Dead Don’t Die), I discovered when I tried to turn the TV off that the batteries in the remote had died, apparently mid-movie. I couldn’t turn the TV off! And AFAIK there are no physical controls on the TV. I could have just pulled the plug out, but I was reluctant since it’s plugged into a power board with a bunch of other stuff and it would have been non-trivial to work out which was the correct cord. So I scavenged batteries from another device, and managed to turn the TV off.

Today I went out to the supermarket specifically to buy new batteries. When I got home I opened the remote to install brand new ones, and discovered that one of the emergency batteries Id installed last night had leaked! Urk! So I removed those batteries and stuck them in my battery recycling pile, and cleaned out the leaked chemicals carefully with cotton tips and isopropyl alcohol. before installing the new batteries.

I also spent time sewing up Scully favourite plush toy. Again. She’s ripped holes and extracted stuffing from it about 20 or 30 times, and I keep repairing it because it’s her oldest and most favourite dog toy.

In travel planning, my wife’s sister sent us this article about cherry blossoms in Japan, saying that we’ll be there around the right time to view the early February-blooming flowers in Kawazu, a day trip from Tokyo. I’m keen to go there and see them, because in all the times I’ve visited Japan I’ve never seen more than the odd single tree with blossoms on it—one time in Yokohama in February I was surprised to spot one blooming that early. But it appears the Kawazu variety always blooms so early. So now I want to try to plan our time to fit in a journey there to see them.

New content today:

Booking Tokyo

Today was very warm, 31°C in the city, 39°C in some suburbs. I did a 5k run in the morning, reluctantly, as it was already almost 25°C at 9am.

Back home, I had two main tasks for the day. First I photographed a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, based on the scripts I’ve been writing the past few days. This is really getting near the end. I wound up a few of the story themes and there’s not much left to do with the remaining ones. I expect I might be able to finish completely with one more batch of comics, probably made late January or early February.

The second task was to book several of the things we’d planned out for Tokyo at my sister-in-law’s place yesterday. We booked a tea ceremony, in Ginza. And a day trip tour to Hakone to see Mount Fuji. These things will be done by the others while I am working in ISO Photography standards meetings. I also want to book tickets to the Shibuya Sky observation deck, but they only open for booking four weeks in advance, so that has to wait until the end of January.

While booking those, I also booked a car rental for Auckland for our short trip to New Zealand in March. This is only a 3-day trip over the weekend to visit my wife’s nephew and his partner there for their combined 30th birthdays. My wife’s sister and mother are going too, but they are arriving several days earlier and spending a week there. We’re going to collect the car from the airport on Friday and go pick them up at their hotel to drive up to the Bay of Islands for the weekend, before coming back to Auckland for departure on Monday.

I assembled some of the IWC comics. And then spent a bit of time in the afternoon pondering story details for Episode IX in Darths & Droids, discussing with co-authors, and making notes. It’s quite a shift in mode from normal strip writing in the middle of a movie. I have to switch mental gears and get refamiliarised with the new movie. I’ve spent the past two years viewing scenes from Episode VIII over and over again, and now I have to discard all of that and start on the new movie. I’ve rewatched it twice in the past few weeks, including one time through in slow motion, rewinding and pausing every minute or so to catch details and make notes.

For dinner I made pizza, topped simply with potato and rosemary. I used a couple of tips I saw on a cooking show last week. Because I’m using a domestic oven rather than a pizza oven, the temperature is lower and the pizza cooks more slowly (though still pretty quickly as I use the maximum temperature). So one tip is to add more water to the dough, since it has longer to dry out in the oven. I increased the water from a strict 1:2 ratio with the flour, adding an extra 5 mL to make 130 mL of water to 250 g of flour. And I hand-stretched the dough by first using my fingers to delineate a fatter crust around the rim before flattening and stretching the central area. Overall both changes worked well!

New content today:

A nice Italian dinner, planning for Japan

Friday was online games night with my friends, so no blog post. Earlier in the evening, I went with my wife to a new Italian restaurant I’d discovered recently, named Enoteca 128. It’s a short drive from our home and has outdoor tables so we can take Scully. It’s in a relatively quiet alley off the main road, so it was a bit quieter than some of the usual places we go, and Scully could relax rather than bark at everyone walking their dogs past.

The food was delicious. We began with some zucchini flowers stuffed with sweet potato and taleggio cheese, served with a spicy dressing of softened red capsicum and almonds. We both had tagliatelle pasta, with a simple tomato and basil sauce for my wife, while I had the lamb ragu. Then for dessert I had a honey pannacotta with fresh berries and honeycomb. It was all very god and we’ll definitely keep this place in mind for future visits.

Earlier in the day we did a big walk and I worked on some comics stuff. And then after getting home from dinner I played games with friends: Ticket to Ride, Jump Drive, Just One, Azul, Can’t Stop. I won the last game, so finished on a high note, despite not doing so well in the others.

Today, Saturday, I did a 5k run first thing in the morning. The cool weather is heating up again and it was already 25°C when I did my run at 9 am. So I went a bit slowly.

After lunch we went over to my wife’s sister’s place to meet her and their mother and do some itinerary planning for our upcoming trip to Tokyo at the end of February. They want to plan and book some activities, such as a tea ceremony, and a day trip to Mount Fuji. We went through a bunch of options and found some online activities to book. So that’s more organised now. We also discussed our other trip, to Auckland in New Zealand, which is just a few weeks later. For that one we need to book a hire car, as we’ll be doing some driving, up to the Bay of Islands.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Seeking tea ceremonies

We had a rude awakening this morning, when Scully threw up on the bed, around 6:30. Normally my wife gets up about then but I sleep in a bit – but today I had to leap out of bed and deal with Scully being sick, and strip off the bed linen and get it in the washing machine. Scully seems okay though, she recovered quickly and ate her breakfast with gusto.

I had two ethics classes in the morning, then went for a walk to pick up Scully from my wife’s work (as she’d taken her with her after breakfast). I worked on some more Darths & Droids stuff again, trying to get ahead and start thinking about the start of Episode IX, which is coming up very soon.

I also spent some time searching for a traditional tea ceremony experience that we can book for Tokyo. My wife’s mother and sister are travelling with us at the end of February, and neither have been to Japan before. They are keen to try some cultural experiences, and thought a tea ceremony would be good. So I searched and found a few places in Tokyo that offer this. The range is quite broad, with some offering kimono dressing as part of it, others not, some traditional tatami mat seating on the floor, others table seating. I need to confirm with everyone what they would prefer before narrowing it down.

Last night I started watching Dune Part 2 on Netflix. Since Part 1 is no longer on Netflix, I read the plot summary on Wikipedia to remind myself. I’m very glad I did, because I would have been so confused without the refresher. But with it, I think I’ve followed all the important points of the story. I’ll watch more tonight, but at close to three hours running time I think I’ll have to split it over three nights of watching.

New content today:

Planning for a New Zealand trip

Today I did my 5k run in the morning before it got too hot. I briefly thought about trying another 7.5k, but yesterday was exhausting enough! Even though it was early in the morning, the sun felt like it had a sting in it and I used sunscreen.

I spent the morning doing a new Darths & Droids comic. In the afternoon I planned out a couple more weeks of ethics lesson topics, coming up with preliminary lists of questions for a week on “Hate” and a week on “Driving”. I also made a sourdough loaf for the new work week starting tomorrow, so my wife can take sandwiches from home for lunch.

We’ve also been planning a short trip to New Zealand, in March next year. My wife’s nephew has moved to Auckland. From Oslo! – where he spent a few years after leaving Sydney. So since he’s now relatively close to here, his mother (my wife’s sister) is planning a trip to visit for his birthday next year, and my wife asked if we could go along too. Her sister is going for a week, but we’re just going to take a long weekend, leaving on Friday and flying home on Monday. So today my wife chose some hotels in Auckland and we booked one. We also did flights a few days ago.

So we now have three trips booked for next year: Tokyo in February, for my ISO Photography Standards meeting. Auckland in March. And Berlin in June, which will be for the next ISO Photography meeting, which will be a plenary meeting of the whole technical committee (which happens every two years – the last one was in Okayama, Japan, in 2023).

This is after this year, when we’re not traveling anywhere. We knew we weren’t doing any overseas trips, but we’d considered a driving trip to Adelaide around September/October. However when my wife changed jobs we had to reconsider, as she wouldn’t have enough leave saved up, so we abandoned that idea.

In other news, our new neighbours next door gave us a jar of home made Seville orange marmalade! We’ve been eating it on bread and it’s deliciously tart.

New content today:

Sudden cranes

I had four classes this morning, which ate up half the day. At lunch time I took Scully for a walk to get some fish & chips. We walked past the construction site of the new apartment complex that is being built and I was surprised to see that three giant cranes have sprung up over the weekend.

I also popped into the post office to get a box to pack an old unopened Lego set that I’d sold on eBay. It was a 1999 Star Wars X-wing set that I’d bought back then because it was on sale. I bought two of them and never bothered opening one of them. I checked recently, and unopened copies of this set sell for several hundred dollars! So I auctioned it off, and got $310 for it. So I had to get a packing box to mail it – to Switzerland! Back home I packed the set up with lots of bubble wrap. And then had to trek out to the post office again to send it.

In other news, we’re planning a trip to Tokyo next February, to coincide with one of my ISO Photography meetings. My wife wanted to go to Japan again, so she can do things while I’m in the meetings. And she invited her mother and sister to come too – they’ve never been to Japan before, so they were excited and we all booked tickets on the same flights.

New content today:

Day trip to Berrima

With the week off work, we decided to spend the day taking a drive out into the countryside. My wife and I took Scully for a drive to Berrima, a nice little “day-tripper” village a couple of hours south-west, in the Southern Highlands region.

We arrived about 11:00 and spent some time looking at the various handicrafts and foodie shops.

Many of the buildings in Berrima are very old and heritage listed. There’s an old sandstone courthouse and a prison where they kept convicts back in the early 19th century. To go along with this old-timey feel, there are a couple of antiques shops. We went in one and looked around. There were rooms full of stuff older than me. And then in one room I spotted something a little incongruous for an “antique shop” – see if you can spot it:

We stopped in at the Berrima Vault House for lunch. This is a restaurant housed in a heritage building built in 1844 by convict labourers, originally to house convicts. A waiter gave us a guided tour of the place before we had lunch, showing us several basement rooms with barred windows, that were used to house convicts. There was also a tunnel leading from the basement directly to the old courthouse across the road.

Besides the history, the food was good! I had a baked red snapper fillet for lunch:

followed by elderflower pannacotta with poached pears:

After lunch we drove back home via a different route, heading east to the coast through Macquarie Pass, which is a beautiful scenic winding road down a steep mountainside through lush forest. We got home just before dinner time, after a total driving distance of 320 km. A great day out!

New content today:

A day out on the Parramatta River

Friday night was online board games night, so I was too busy to write up a blog entry. But yesterday was very busy!

My wife and I got up early. She went to the gym, while I took Scully out and had breakfast. When she got back we prepped to head out for the day. We drive down to Greenwich Point Wharf and caught a ferry over to Cockatoo Island.

We weren’t here to explore the island, but to change ferries and catch another one up the Parramatta River. In fact, dogs aren’t allowed on Cockatoo Island, but we were only with Scully on the ferry wharf, and didn’t exit to the actual island. The second ferry took us to Meadowbank, where we alighted to meet Luna, Scully’s best buddy who used to live next door to us. They moved about six months ago and we’ve only seen them once since then. The two poodles went bananas when they saw each other and were so excited and jumping all over the place.

Luna’s owner took us for a walk around her new neighbourhood. We walked under the John Whitton Bridge:

This is two bridges side by side, one for pedestrians, and one carrying two train lines. (There’s a road bridge a couple of hundred metres downstream, behind me as I took this photo.) We followed a walking/cycle track along the river shore, between mangroves on the river side and several playing fields on the right. The destination was a dog park, where we let both Luna and Scully off leash to have a run and play in the grass.

The day was very nice, not too hot, and without the rain of the previous few days. After letting the dogs play for a while, and catching up with our former neighbour, we walked back to the wharf and past it to her new apartment, where her husband was busy working. They have a very nice new place.

We left just before lunch and walked up to Meadowbank station to get something to eat at a cafe, but when we got there they said the kitchen had closed and they were only serving coffee! So we walked back down to the ferry wharf, where there was another cafe. We had lunch there – I got a Korean fried chicken burger, and my wife an eggs benedict with halloumi. Then we hopped on a ferry back down the river towards home.

We passed under the Gladesville Bridge:

This was the longest concrete arch bridge in the world when it opened in 1964, until surpassed by the Krk Bridge in 1980. And here’s a view of the city as we got closer to Cockatoo Island again:

We changed ferries again on Cockatoo Island, and I got a shot of Scully, although it was a bit windy!

After returning to Greenwich, we went on a bit of a drive, getting home after 4pm. I went for a 5k run in the evening and then it was straight into board games night. I played games of It’s a Wonderful World, which I lost in the last round by just a few points after taking a big lead into that round, and Viticulture, which I won.

This morning, Saturday, I went for another 5k run! Then just rested at home for much of the day, before the mad two-day scramble for Christmas begins tomorrow. I went for a walk in the early evening to drop off two Dungeons & Dragons books at Professor Plums, for the DM who runs games there on Saturday nights. I’ve decided I want to get rid of a lot of the 5th edition adventure books that I have, since I’m never going to use them. I asked if she’d like them and there were two she didn’t have already, so I took them up and gave them to her. (Storm King’s Thunder, and Princes of the Apocalypse, if you’re curious.)

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Tidying up travel writing

Today I knocked off a couple of travel-related chores. Firstly, I wrote up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Tampere a couple of weeks ago. I need to summarise the entire meeting and any significant outcomes for Standards Australia, and submit the report to them, within 4 weeks of the meeting.

That took up until lunch time. The weather was a bit rainy and miserable again, so I couldn’t be bothered going for a run today.

In the afternoon I decided to tackle a less urgent travel issue. I still hadn’t finished processing photos and adding them to my travel diary for our trip to Germany and the Netherlands last year! I was partway through the last day in Amsterdam, so there wasn’t a lot to do, but I figured I better get it done, now that I have another whole trip backed up, along with the trip to Japan in June this year. I didn’t want to have three old trips that I hadn’t completed photo diaries for!

For dinner tonight, my wife and I went out for the first time since getting home from Italy. We didn’t want Italian food, so we went to a French crêpe place. Almost every time I go there I don’t have anything off the regular menu, because they always have a couple of specials, and they always look really good. Today was no exception – they had a chilli prawn galette and a butter chicken one! I would have liked to try both, but I decided on the chilli prawn. Normally I’d follow with a sweet crêpe for dessert, but I had that salted caramel tart I bought yesterday still, so I saved my dessert for later.

New content today:

Europe diary, days 16, 17: The journey home

Sunday 19 November

We set alarms to get up at 06:15. We had a quick breakfast and completed packing the last few things such as toiletries. I went out to take out all of the garbage, separated into paper, plastic bottles, food waste, and mixed waste. The apartment instructions said we had to take it out to a public collection point in the nearby piazza by 10:00 for collection there. We’d seen large waste bins there when walking past in previous days, but when I went this time there were none! I thought I might just have to dump the bags on the footpath and hope someone collected them, but then I saw some smaller bins a little way down a side street. The first one I tried was locked, but fortunately the others weren’t and I managed to put the food and bottles in appropriate bins. I didn’t see a paper bin, so ended up putting that in with the mixed waste.

We left the apartment just before 07:00, walking with our luggage along the street to Spagna metro station, where we caught a train to Termini. There we bought tickets for the Leonardo Express to Fiumicino Airport, but saw that the next departure wasn’t until 07:50! So we had about 25 minutes to wait. We decided to go to the platform, where several of the express trains were standing end to end, but then we spotted signs saying that the train wasn’t running today and there was a replacement bus. Following the signs took us outside where a worker in a red uniform vest told us to walk down the street a hundred metres or so to where his colleagues in red vests were loading the buses. We got there and put our large bags in the bus luggage compartment then climbed on board. The bus left about ten minutes earlier than the scheduled train time, so that was okay, and we got to Fiumicino about 08:15, earlier than the train would have arrived.

We checked in, went through security and passport control, and then went to relax a bit in the Plaza Lounge before boarding. This lounge wasn’t as nice as the Singapore SilverKris lounge, but it was okay. M. got a couple of coffees and some small cornetti for her last Italian breakfast, while I ate the last of the apples that we’d bought a few days ago. Eventually we went to the gate and boarded the plane. It was delayed pushing back from the gate by about 15 minutes before departure due to flight congestion. Hopefully that won’t cause us to be too late into Singapore, as our connection time is tight there.

Monday 20 November

Our first flight landed in Singapore just before sunrise. We only had 25 minutes before boarding began for our flight to Sydney, so not much time to do a lot. We both tried to snooze on the flights. We arrived back in Sydney about 17:45. We had a dream run out of the airport, thanks to not having to wait for any checked luggage. There were no other flights arriving and the arrivals areas for immigration control and customs were completely empty. Many people went to wait for luggage while we just waked straight out.

We caught a train and were home before 19:00. Then we had to drive over to our friends’ place to collect Scully!

Tuesday 21 November

I went to bed about 23:00, read until I fell asleep, and slept until about 05:00 before becoming wide awake, so that wasn’t too bad. Mostly I took it easy, because I wasn’t feeling great. I did go for a run, the first since before the trip. I thought I’d do an easy 5k, but by 2.5k I was utterly worn out and stopped there.

I basically just spent time unpacking and cleaning up all the stuff around the house. I revived the sourdough starter and made a loaf of bread. Oh, and I went through maybe 100 emails that I had to deal with in some way. Hopefully I’ll get a good night’s sleep and be back in the correct time zone by tomorrow!