australia!

we've just returned from a fantastic week in australia, so as we sift through our pictures and organize our notes, i thought i'd share with you a couple of things we did differently on this trip that made it rock especially hard.

1. stayed in an apartment-style hotel room with a kitchenette, eating out for one meal per day and cooking for the other meal. in our house, breakfast doesn't really count as a meal (sorry, karen and joel - i know it kills you to hear that!), so we snacked on breakfast bars or stopped for coffee in the mornings.

2. packed lightly - just a daypack each plus a shopping bag between the two of us. we could get away with this for 8 days because our hotels had in-room washer/dryer units, so we packed for 4 days and wore each outfit twice. this method worked overall, but was a bit frustrating when the dryer in melbourne failed to work and we had to bring wet clothes along on the plane to sydney.

3. chose a hotel that was central enough to let us come back frequently throughout the day for naps and snacks. i was trying to avoid my typical grueling, museum madness "vacationing" this time around, and i think it worked.

4. explored by night - we arrived in sydney at dusk and contemplated waiting for morning to head downtown, but were later glad to have spent that evening by the light of the city and not the light of the hotel tv. the views of the opera house and sydney harbour bridge were breathtaking at night, and bryan claims that first evening as his favorite part of the entire trip.

5. visited two cities. we hope to return to australia soon, but if that doesn't happen for a while at least we've gotten a taste of a couple of different places. besides, bryan wanted to go to sydney and i wanted to go to melbourne, so this kept us both happy.

6. enforced a "no american restaurants" rule to make us explore beyond mcdonalds and subway. this resulted in some wonderful meals, most notably a very fine snapper and swordfish on the waterfront in sydney and an incredible artichoke pizza from +39 pizzeria and degustation in melbourne that's making my mouth water as i type this. mmm.

7. bought things we actually wanted as personal souvenirs. we enjoyed an exhibit at melbourne's acmi (australian center for the moving image) museum about the claymation film mary and max, so we bought the movie and watched it in the hotel one evening. in sydney, i bought a cute skirt that was on sale, knowing that when i wear it, i'll remember where it was from. sorry about the crappy postcards that the rest of you are getting :)

what are your great travel tips?

-rachel