Tag: travel

We’re starting to prepare for our trip to Japan on Saturday. I’ve been wondering if the old Suica cards that we have from our previous trip to Japan (in February 2018) would still work, and would still have the stored yen on them. Its been over 5 years since we used them. (I just Google searched now and apparently Suica cards stay valid for 10 years since their last use, at which point they expire and any stored credit is lost.)

(Before Googling) I thought I’d ask on reddit’s Japan Travel subreddit, but my post got auto-rejected by the moderator bot for being too common a question. But the moderator bot message did point me at the FAQ, where I found an article about Suica cards. It mentions that there is a “mobile Suica” which you can install in an iPhone’s Wallet app, and you can transfer physical Suica cards into your Apple Wallet as well.

So I tried it using my phone with one of the cards. I had to enter the last 4 digits of the card serial number, then let the phone scan it, and hey presto! I now have a digital Suica card in my Apple Wallet, and it shows me the balance is 1485 yen! I had my wife scan the other card we have, and now she also has a digital Suica on her phone, with a few hundred yen on it. So now we can toss the physical cards and tap our phones to board trains in Japan. And an extra cool thing is that we can top up the stored value completely on our phones, using Wallet to transfer money from a credit/debit card onto Suica. So we no longer have to navigate the Suica recharge machines in Japanese train stations.

This is all very cool, and I’m glad I looked into it.

And… I just had another look in Apple Wallet to see what other transit cards can be added… and it includes Clipper Cards, used in the San Francisco Bay Area! We have Clipper Cards too, because I’ve visited SF many times. I’ll have to transfer those to our phones as well.

In other news, today I had the last three ethics classes of the Documentary Films topic. Tomorrow I start on Natural Resources with the Tuesday kids.

My wife had the day off work, for the King’s Birthday public holiday. It’s weird, this is the first time in my lifetime that we’ve had the King’s Birthday instead of the Queen’s Birthday. It’s amazing how much difference that little change makes. The Queen’s Birthday was just a normal thing that happens every year. But the King’s Birthday feels surreal and strange.

We took Scully on a nice walk in the midday warmth. The mornings and evenings are getting cold, but the middle of the day is still quite pleasant. It’s been a very mild winter so far, and with El Niño happening now I suspect it’ll stay mild and not get really cold.

And this afternoon I made a few more Irregular Webcomic! strips using the photos I took a couple of weeks ago. I made enough to last this week, which ends with strip number 5000 on Friday. So yeah, I made my 5000th IWC strip. It’s a weird feeling knowing I’ve been making this comic for… over 20 years now. I kind of want to retire it at some point soon, within the next 6 months, or year, or so. But I feel a need to tie up all the storylines I’ve started now. So it’ll be a little while yet.

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! #4996
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5137
• Comments on a Postcard #5262

Today we went on a road trip, south to the town of Berry. My wife and I took Scully in the car for the drive south down the coast. We left just after 9am, intending to arrive at Berry in time for lunch. We stopped once along the way at a rest stop to stretch our legs and let Scully relieve herself, and arrived in Berry just before midday.

We went to The Garden, a cafe/restaurant with outdoor seating where we could eat with Scully. I’d tried to book it online, but they only take bookings for tables of 6 or more people, so we just had to show up and hope they had a table for us. I expected it to be busy with day trippers and school holiday vacationers. The main street of Berry was indeed very busy, but we were early enough to beat the lunch rush and got a table right away. I had the chicken cotoletta, and my wife had the pear and walnut salad with grilled haloumi. It was pretty good. And after that we had a couple of scones with jam and cream for dessert.

We took Scully for a walk over to The Treat Factory, a place that makes chocolates, other sweets, and also jams, sauces, chutneys, mustards, pickles, and similar sorts of stuff. It’s a pleasant walk a bit over a kilometre out from the centre of the town. I grabbed packs of liquorice allsorts, jelly snakes, mint dark chocolate rocky road, and a jar of pear and vanilla jam and a bottle of “red hot” chilli sauce.

After a leisurely walk back to the car we headed off home again. We took a more scenic route home, along the coast rather than the inland freeway, and got home just after 6pm. Here’s a map of the route, pretty much 300 km there and back. A good day out!

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! rerun annotation #2430
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #5079
• Comments on a Postcard #5204

There’s not too much to say about today, as it was a driving day, heading home from our short trip to Orange.

We got up in the morning, had breakfast and showers, and took Scully for a walk over to the cafe where my wife got her morning coffee again. The forecast for today was showers, but the day looked bright and sunny… except as we left for the walk it started raining, out of an almost clear blue sky! It didn’t last long though.

Back at the hotel we packed our bags and the car, and then headed off for the drive home. We headed east straight through Bathurst and to Lithgow, where we stopped to have a light lunch, at a cafe where we’ve eaten a few times on previous trips.

From there, we drove straight through to home, crossing the Blue Mountains via Bell’s Line of Road this time, rather than the Great Western Highway which we’d taken west on Tuesday. This road is more scenic, but a bit slower. We passed through large areas of burnt-out forest, from the huge fires in 2019-2020, which threatened Lithgow.

We got home around 3pm, and unpacked the car. We took Scully for a bit of a walk, up to the supermarket so I could get some vegetables and fruit, and also some eggs, to last us a few days until I can do a full grocery shop.

At home I went through my SLR photos, mostly of birds from the wetlands and reservoirs we visited in the past few days. I haven’t uploaded them all yet, but here are a teaser of introduced species before I do all the native birds: Common starling:

And a spotted dove:

New content today:

• Irregular Webcomic! rerun annotation #2360
• Square Root of Minus Garfield #4869
• Comments on a Postcard #4994

I woke up about 6:30 this morning and got up to use the bathroom, which prompted Scully to get up and want to go outside. So I got dressed and took her out. Fortunately the rain had stopped overnight and the morning was clear and sunny. Then I had some muesli for breakfast while Scully crept back to bed and my wife slept in a bit more.

This morning we decided to go and explore a park where we could take Scully for a walk. We headed out of town to Gosling Creek Reserve, which is a large park next to Gosling Creek Reservoir. It has a network of walking paths which are used for the Orange Parkrun, going around the edge of the reservoir and then back through a mix of scrub, eucalyptus trees, and lawn areas with picnic tables and playground equipment. I took my camera and got a few shots of birds, including some eastern rosellas, which were very cool. We spent a good hour or more walking around and enjoying the scenery and bird life.

After this we headed back into town briefly to pick up a couple of apples that we’d got from the hotel reception desk earlier. The plan was to use these to supplement the cheese platter that we were going to get with our wine tasting at Word of Mouth Wines, which my wife had booked before our trip. We chose them because they were dog-friendly, but they said they didn’t serve lunch – only a bit of cheese and crackers as a snack.

At Word of Mouth we were greeted by a friendly man and his large labradoodle Artemis. He showed us to a sunny room out the back, looking over a field with a couple of alpacas in it. We did the wine tasting, which was a series if white wines, a rosé, and just one red. My wife liked it better than yesterday’s at Brangayne, and we bought a couple of bottles – resisting more because we don’t have a lot of room in the car. A problem was that what we expected was an optional cheese platter which we could buy, and which would be at least moderately substantial. But what we got was a complementary plate with just a couple of crackers with cheese on them and a couple with slices of sausage, which the man said was to clear our palates between the wines.

Here’s Scully at the winery:

So we had our apples and then when we left the winery we drove further along the road to Lake Conobolas, where there was a cafe at which we hoped to get something else to eat. Lake Conobolas is a reservoir in Lake Conobolas Reserve, another large park with picnic areas. The cafe had indoor seating, but it was attached to a kiosk doing take-away food and there were plenty of picnic tables around. We grabbed a table and got some wraps to eat, pumpkin for my wife and Moroccan chicken for me.

After eating we walked around a bit, crossing the dam wall, which was spilling water down into Molong Creek below. This was the result of all the rain we’ve had this year, plus the 40 mm extra added just yesterday. News today was reporting more flooding in parts of regional New South Wales, including roads cut at Bathurst, which we need to drive through tomorrow to get back home to Sydney. And although today was dry, more rain is forecast for tomorrow.

Leaving Lake Conobolas, we drove back a little along the same road to the Pinnacle Lookout, which the guy at Word of Mouth Winery had told us was a beautiful place with amazing views. We climbed a steep set of wooden steps from the car park up to the lookout, which was perched atop some granite boulders at the top of the hill. It gave us a panoramic view of the landscape below, sweeping from the west through north to the east. It was very windy and cold on the exposed lookout, so we didn’t stay too long.

From here we drove back to Orange, taking a loop around further west and north than we’d been before, so we got to see some new roads and scenery. The connecting cross-roads were nice and slow, especially because there were a lot of nasty potholes full of rainwater which I had to slow down and dodge to avoid damaging the car. It was really a case of veering all over the road and taking it slowly. Some of the potholes looked very deep and nasty indeed, but we managed to avoid anything like that.

We relaxed a bit in the hotel before heading out for dinner in the evening. We walked over to Lolli Redini, which had told me that we could walk-in for a table outdoors, depending on the weather. However when we got there the waiter seemed surprised that we wanted to sit outside and said they hadn’t got any tables set up. He kind of said he could set up a table for us, but he clearly sounded reluctant to actually do so and was trying to talk us out of it. He recommended we go down the block to Birdie, a more casual restaurant and bar operated by the same owners. So we did that.

It turned out to be really nice there, with several tables outside under the wide awning – all empty until we grabbed one. My wife wanted to know if they could make the seafood spaghetti into a vegetarian version, so I asked when ordering at the bar, and the woman there went to check with the kitchen, coming back to confirm that it could be done. I ordered the grilled salmon, and we also got some bar nuts to snack on. My wife had a glass of Pinot Noir while I had a cocktail called a Budgie Smuggler, which was sparkling wine, absinthe, apple juice, and something else that I forget. It was very nice, and the food was really good. The chef had added mushrooms, zucchini, and pumpkin to the pasta sauce, which was very nice rather than just making it without the seafood.

The dessert special sounded good, being a citrus chocolate mousse with churros, but just next door was an amazing looking gelato place called Spilt Milk. It was clearly popular, with hordes of people there getting scoops to eat, at times queueing out the door. I walked over there and got two scoops: salted caramel, and ricotta with honey. I ate it sitting back at our table at Birdie, and it was really good.

Then we waked back to the hotel for our last night here in Orange before heading home tomorrow.

We all slept a lot better last night. Scully was much more settled, which meant my wife and I could get a good sleep too. We were so tired after not sleeping the previous night that we slept in until after 8:30. When we got up, it was raining steadily outside, as forecast. I took Scully down to the grass for her toilet, which was wet but not as cold as I expected.

We had breakfast (mine was the leftover pizza from Parrot Distillery), then had showers and got ready to head out in the wet. M. wanted to go to Ever Coffee Roasters cafe, which we’d spotted yesterday on the other side of the railway station. It’s a short walk from our hotel, just over the railway line. They had some tables outside under a wide awning, so we could sit while my wife had her coffee, though it was pretty chilly. While we sat there, we could see through a window into the home decoration shop next door, where a toddler was crawling around and sitting in a display box of little coloured samples of carpet.

We walked back through the rain to the hotel. Then we hopped in the car to drive out to Spotlight, so my wife could look through some of the fabrics there to choose some for making dog bandanas. This was a backup time filler while it was raining heavily. The car navigation system tried to take us along a road that had been permanently blocked off, and then when we went around we ended up on a brand new road that didn’t exist in the navigation database. Fortunately I had a good idea where we needed to go, so we ended up there without too much trouble. Scully got to explore the store while my wife found a bunch of fabrics she wanted to buy.

From there we drove over to the Nile Street Cafe, where we’d booked lunch. Earlier my wife checked by phoning up that they had somewhere we could sit outside but out of the rain, which they confirmed. The cafe was a converted house in the middle of a residential street. It looked nice and had a fairly fancy menu. I had the battered barramundi with chips and salad, and then a slice of a Persian tart, which had lots of almonds and pistachios in it, topped with dried rose petals, and infused with rosewater, which was really nice. As we ate these, the rain eased off and stopped, and the sun came out, filtering through the clouds. We decided it would be a good chance to walk Scully around the block to get some exercise before leaving. But as we packed up to go, the rain started up again, and it was heavy by the time we went back to the car and climbed in.

While at the cafe, I found and contacted Brangayne Winery, which was the first one to come up for dog-friendly wineries in the region. I left a message and a woman phoned back to confirm that yes, we could bring our dog and do a wine tasting, indoors out of the rain. So we drove over there through the rain and entered the vineyard, which had a nice view over a broad valley looking back towards Orange. The tasting was in an old apple storage shed, which the woman there told us was used to store fruit from when the property was originally an orchard, growing apples and stone fruits. It converted to a vineyard in the 1990s.

We did a full tasting of the wines: Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Shiraz, and the winery’s signature “Tristan” blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Shiraz. The Chardonnay was named “Isolde”, as the winery itself was named after Brangayne, a handmaiden of Isolde as told in the Arthurian legend. We bought a half dozen bottles to take home, mostly the Merlot and the red blend, which were the best in our opinion.

The rain had started again heavily while we were inside, so we decided to wait a bit before braving it to get back in the car. After a while, I realised that there was a loading ramp under cover, and I could go get the car and back it onto the ramp and then we could load the car without having to deal with the heavy rain. So we did that and then headed off back to Orange.

At the hotel, the rain had stopped again, and we set out for a bit of a walk to give Scully some more exercise. But it started raining yet again, and we decided to keep it short, just going around the block. For dinner we decided to order take-away from an Indian restaurant. I chose The Upper House, which was highly rated online. We had dhal tadka and malai kofta with rice and a piece of roti. I considered some of the meat dishes, but after having duck two nights ago and lamb last night I didn’t feel like any sort of meat tonight, so went for the extra vegetarian option. I went out in the rain again to pick it up, leaving M. and Scully in the room to stay dry. The food was very good, with the dhal being a bit spicy even though I’d asked for mild when they asked how spicy we wanted it.

It’s still raining steadily. Checking the Bureau of Meteorology, I see we’ve had close to 40 mm of rain in the Orange region today. The forecast is for it to continue until about 7am but then start clearing up. So hopefully tomorrow we’ll have some better weather.

We had a very restless night last night. Scully was on edge all night and kept wanting to get up and look around the hotel room, and twice she wanted to go outside to toilet. So I had to get dressed in multiple layers of clothing to survive the polar temperature outside and take her out in the middle of the night. I don’t even know what time it was, but maybe midnight and around 2am. And in between she was almost constantly moving around or growling at noises outside in the street. I think overall I got maybe an hour or two of sleep.

My wife and I were up before 7am as Scully got up with the sun. I took her down to the grass across the street again for the usual morning toilet. After that I went for a walk a couple of blocks to the nearest supermarket to buy some muesli and milk for us to eat in the room for breakfast. I paused to take a photo of this gorgeous Art Deco hotel on the main street:

After eating, we went for a drive to check out some of the local wetlands for bird life. I took my SLR and long lens and we stopped first at the Brooklands Wetlands. This was a bit disappointing, being a creek running behind a row of houses, and accessible only by a strip of muddy grass. I didn’t see many birds at all, and got my shoes wet enough to soak the socks. After a bit we gave up and returned to the car to try driving over to the Coogal Park Wetlands. This was much better! There was a paved path running along a stream lined with bullrushes and other wetland vegetation. We followed it north for about a kilometre, and spotted a dozen or more different bird species. I managed to get some hopefully decent photos of a crimson rosella parent and a juvenile still in the nest, and a grey fantail.

We stopped to fill the car with petrol on the way back to the hotel. Then we went for a walk through the centre of Orange, checking out the main street and one of the small parks, where we let Scully play in the grass a bit. We wanted to get her walking a lot today to wear her out for tonight so she sleeps!

Now it was approaching noon and we walked over to Parrot Distillery where we’d booked a lunch. We found the distillery and they welcomed Scully inside, where there were several tables in the shed where they did the distillation, with a bar and a pizza oven on the side. I got a tasting board of three of their exotic gins: sloe gin, oriental gin, and bush botanicals. They were all very different and good. To go with the drinks we ordered a rosemary bread, which turned out to be a pizza crust with rosemary springs and large flakes of salt, which was good. Then we ordered a margherita pizza and a pizza with local pork and fennel sausage and potato on it. They were both really good. We took a few leftover slices back to the hotel.

After lunch, we decided to take Scully out to the Orange Botanic Gardens. I didn’t feel like driving after all the gin, so we walked. It was a fair way, over 4 km each way. The gardens were very nice, but a little bare coming out of winter into early spring.

There were some magnolias in flower, and wattle trees, but not much else.

We walked back, with Scully walking all the way home. She should be really tired tonight!

We stopped in at the hotel briefly before heading out again for dinner, at the Union Bank restaurant. We sat in the very nice courtyard, which was not as cold as sitting outside at the Peacock Lounge last night. We shared a cos salad, a cheese platter, and the lamb dish, sliced and served with baba ganoush and some pickled vegetables and chilis. It was good, but not as good as last night’s dinner. Then we walked back home to the hotel for the night.

Tomorrow will be interesting. The forecast is for up to 40 mm of rain in the region, and catching the evening news tonight we saw that authorities are concerned about potential flooding.