Hot Tub at the Hotel before Dinner

Australia Travelog #33
Leura, NSW - Fri, 29 Dec 2023, 6pm

After all that hiking today on an already-sprained ankle I felt what I needed was a good soak in the hotel's hot tub. Plus, it's no yet dinner hour— so many restaurants in the area are closed, including the one we want to eat at tonight. Unlike in the US ordinary restaurants aren't open throughout the day. Many serve lunch, close from 2-5pm or 2-6pm, then reopen for dinner. Others stay open from lunch until 5pm but then close for the day. And several only serve dinner, not opening at all until 5 or 6pm. On the one hand, this makes sense: people who run locally owned restaurants don't want to work all day. On the other hand, coming from the US, it's downright weird to see so much of service industry, well, not be serving.

Anyway, about that hot tub....



The hotel has a fairly large indoor pool as well as a very small outdoors pool. The hot tub is indoors. I do wish it were outdoors. Building the lap pool indoors, I understand. Even the summer weather here is not always hot— or even warm. Like, it's literally the middle of summer right now, equivalent to late June in the northern hemisphere, and it's barely 70° F (21° C) this afternoon. But the hot tub feels great even on cooler days, so it'd be nice to have it outdoors with the fresh air instead of indoors where we breathe chlorinated, mildewed air and hear the echoing screams of children apparently trying to kill each other in the pool.

After our aching muscles got a pounding from the jets in the water and our ear drums got a pounding from the kids in the pool, we returned to our room to dry off and dress for dinner.



And this is our room (photo above). Yeah, it's pretty messy right now. When I occasionally describe checking into a hotel with a line like, "We entered the room and immediately strewed our belongings everywhere," this is what I mean. 🤣

Okay, we're not usually this messy. Right now we've got a lot of different clothing, gear, and food laid out. And we're tired and achy, so leaving things like shoes and pants lying on the floor until tomorrow seems reasonable. And what's on the floor is mostly dirty clothes. We'll just kick them into a pile against the wall to straighten up. All our clean clothes are in the closet or in the one open suitcase. The other two suitcases, empty, are tucked away in the closet. So I guess what I'm saying is (a) this is more mess than normal and (b) as bad as it looks it could also be way worse. 🤣

Another Grocery Trip. Pain Killers.

Australia Travelog #34
Leura, NSW - Fri, 29 Dec 2023, 9pm

After dinner this evening we stopped by the grocery store in town again. Our main purpose this time was to buy painkillers. Yeah, my ankle is still killing me after I strained it from hiking down and back up too many canyons on Thursday, then did it no favors as I overdid it again today with several miles of hiking and maybe 1,000 feet of down/up.

Didn't I bring painkillers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen? Oh, I always do. It's just that I've gobbled them all up already and need more to get through the last 48+ hours of this trip. Especially because I want to be active tomorrow, our last full day of the trip, when the weather's supposed to be great (finally! After a week of so much rain!) and there are two outstanding hikes I still want to do.

When it comes to buying over-the-counter painkillers I've read that the huge bottles we can buy in the US are considered crazy and not sold in other countries. Indeed, at the town's grocery store the biggest package of ibuprofen I could buy was 24 pills. Compare that to the US, where at my local Safeway I can buy Advil (brand name) in bottles up to 300 pills and store-brand ibuprofen in packages of up to 500. At Costco I can buy ibuprofen 1,000 at a time. But in Australia, only 24. Foreign doctors on YouTube have mansplained (complete with heavy finger-wagging on camera) it's so I don't kill myself. Thanks, but I learned from a young age not to drink the bottle of pills.

Speaking of drinking the bottle, beer is hard to buy in Australia, too. Oh, there are bars and pubs everywhere. But booze can't be sold at grocery stores. Even ordinary beer and wine can only be sold at specialty liquor stores. Sheesh, these are worse blue laws than just about anywhere in the US. Oh, and because the specialty stores have limited hours you've got to plan ahead if you want to enjoy a drink in the comfort and safety of your own home. I bought a four-pack of some Aussie beer yesterday— planning a midday shopping trip when the stores were actually open— that I'll enjoy a few cans of tonight. To wash down all those ibuprofen. 🤪

Update: We also looked for food for a trail lunch tomorrow at the grocery store. Like our previous visit, there was nothing appropriate. Maybe we'll dine at the BP gas station again tomorrow!

Quiet this past week; worried hell will break loose tomorrow

It's been quiet this past week. It was only a four day work week, which was nice. After we took it easy at home on Monday (definitely a good idea to return from our vacation a day "early" to have a rest day) things were pretty slow at work Tuesday-Friday.

Several of the clients I'm working with advised me before break that they'd plan to pick things back up January 8. Did that mean they were all taking vacations the first week of January, I wondered. Or were their companies doing two-week shutdowns? A colleague offered a third hypothesis the other day: Schools in California are not in session until tomorrow so our clientele, who are largely work-from-home professionals, were probably figuring they'd be too distracted to do any real work until the kids are out of the house again.

So, tomorrow's when the pace should start to pick up again. Given how everything has been seemingly on pause for a few weeks I'm now worried that everything will suddenly be go-go-go tomorrow. If suddenly every project is moved up to the front burner and everyone expects to see prompt progress, it'll be like all hell breaking loose.