The Team Australia Christmas Party 2018

in #teamaustralia5 years ago (edited)

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Christmas Ornaments at @bearone's place

I wanted to type this out while it was still relatively relevant, but time marches on and plans for the next Team Australia Christmas Party should sort of start being organised soon.

Plus I will tag @trudeehunter here who wanted to know more about what happened.

Getting There


From the outset, I have to admit to not having much travel experience, so a LOT of this particular journey was new to me. However, I needed a new adventure and I wanted to stretch my shrinking comfort zone.

I live in Adelaide and the party was in the Blue Mountains of Sydney; they are very beautiful, if you get the chance, I can highly recommend seeing them.

There was a mix up with the dates and flight booking meaning that I would have to fly to Sydney a day earlier than everyone else and stay at @bearone's place until the airbnb place, affectionately known as "Baller House" became available the next day.

The weather on the day of the flight was both wet and windy, which made it difficult for my inexperienced taxi driver to even see me, let alone pick me up. He nearly crashed twice on the way to the airport too! I somehow managed to cut my finger on the plastic trays they have at airport security as well. I wasn't impressed.

The weather pushed the flight back 30 minutes on top of everything else, but we were eventually in the sky and I was on my way to Sydney.

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Wet and windy in Adelaide

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Flying over the Adelaide coastline

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It was an uneventful flight

Sydney

One of the things that people in Sydney won't acknowledge, or even seem to be aware of, is how humid Sydney can be.
The service people, cleaners (janitors) and transit staff, can seem rather defensive, despite my excusing myself before asking which train to catch (Google was wrong!) or where the nearest bin was. Maybe that was just my perception.

The carriages at the ends of the trains are "quiet" carriages, meaning that you need to either wear headphones or be very very quiet. I found out the hard way after disturbing someone sleeping on one of the lower levels. Oops.

The trip up to the Blue Mountains can take anywhere from an hour and a half, to 2 hours depending on delays in the train service.

Meeting Bearone


Upon arrival, I was pleasantly greeted by @bearone, who quickly showed me where I would be staying and offered me an opportunity to freshen up as I was drenched in sweat from the humidity.
()
@bearone and myself

Later we would chat for about 6 hours, before her husband Ben came home. We ran through emotions that matched the ever-changing weather outside, from heated to heavy rain and power-draining lightning strikes and cracks of thunder, but eventually ending in a beautiful double rainbow that arced across the sky so wide I couldn't fit it into camera view. I'd made new friends. After dinner that was delayed by the power outage, Ben and I bonded further after unlocking a few levels of a game called 'Rayman'.
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The beautiful rainbow

Baller House

The next day, after a Breakfast Of Steemians, I made my apologies and I chose to catch the train up to Katoomba to check out Baller House before the others got there. Arriving in Katoomba, I had a light lunch and the best milkshake in a long time. I caught the wrong bus, went in a loop and started again.
I decided to walk the rest of the way to Baller House. Halfway there, the skies opened up and I ducked into a Fish and Chip shop as the rain poured down heavily.

When it stopped I continued my journey, seeing mist coming off of the mountains was a shock after the heavy rains, but not as eerie as the steam coming off of the hot roads, something you don't really see in Adelaide.

In order to get into Baller House, I had to ring the owner to tell me how to get the key out of the it's key-coded storage place and let myself in. You can see more in the Baller House Tour video.

I went back to the Fish and Chip shop / general store and managed to pick up a few snacks and easy to cook meals while I waited for the others.

The Party

The party was delayed until 2pm on the Saturday, which was a blessing in disguise as it allowed @bearone and her husband to go down the mountain get the food supplies and make last minute preparations.

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And boy was there FOOD!

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The attention to detail was amazing. Notice the food labels?

The weather decided to turn nasty...
(

... but it only lasted about and hour because the weather can change very quickly in the Blue Mountains.

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One hour later...

We all had a great time anyway engaging in karaoke, video games, music, dancing, drinking, eating and of course discussing
all things steem related. :D

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A friendly Karaoke battle underway...

At some point I managed to get a leech caught on my finger, but @mattclarke came to my rescue with a cigarette lighter.
The Steem Monsters reward card called "Vampire" had just come out so I was making "life leech" jokes.

We were all given party tote /swag bags that have the Steem logo on them, with handmade and personalised Christmas ornaments, (You can see mine here) chocolates, a bottle of wine, calendars for 2019 and powerbanks. Now, that's love!

We came back the next day just to unwind, talk about things, and deal with the left over food. (I did my best, honest!).
But soon it was time to leave and I said goodbye to everyone before planning the long trip back to Adelaide.

It was a fantastic event and I hope the** 2019 Team Australia Christmas Party**, to be held in Adelaide this time,
is just as good if not better!

Thank you for reading.

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Those that attended in no particular order: @bearone, @mindbodyspirit, @mattclarke, @o07, @vincy, @jay.ell @travelgirl, @shaidon, @chrisdavidphoto and @choogirl.

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Wow! looks like a great time and adventure - spewin couldn't part take... such is life; me an Karaoke = ear plugs hehe.

Cheers

Now now, @o07 wasn't THAT bad...
Just kidding. A great time was had by all. I missed out a lot of details because I wanted to post it. It really was magical.

I saw stuff that I wish I caught on camera. Stuff that doesn't happen in Adelaide. Sigh.

But I wasn't around the karaoke much I too busy being attacked by a leech!

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So lads.... I hate to say but I dont think were gonna be able to make it down for the party this year as Ill be popping around Oct 30..

#ifonlyhubbycanbreastfeed

I'll pass along the news. I am so excited for you! OMG, OMG, OMG!

Hahah thanks so much bro ❤❤

Omg how eventful lol but glad you made it

Do all of your travel adventures go as smoothly as you make it appear?
I do need to go overseas at some point in the near future.

haha it can be chaotic sometimes

I've been meaning to mention, I went back through our conversations and found where I told you the wrong date; so that's totally on me. I absolutely apologise, mate. You handled it real well, and @bearone was very gracious to take you in, so huge thanks to both of you.
Yes, the 2019 Christmas party is going to be fantastic. Still collecting venue options. I was thinking a 3-4 day mid-week thing would be better, maybe late November. If interstaters are going to travel, you don't want it to be for just a few hours.
Everything comes down to price, and what it does over the next few months.
We could have 20 people for an evening at a pub; or 150 people at a dinner-party at $150/head.

That's OK. It gave me a chance to scout out the area a bit and see the sights somewhat. Plus, I got to bond with @bearone a bit (despite all the various social faux pas I made).

There were parts that I didn't include, but I wanted to get the main stuff in the article.

This year should be good. I am not sure what I'll be doing around November and I am not sure anyone really does. I have just started working again but it's sporadic so I have to be really careful with my FIAT for the time being.

I also want to see if I can make Dolphin this year, but we'll see what happens.

1411 > 5000
Not easy, but definitely possible.
Frogcake will help. It's ironic that a bump in price will bring in more traffic but also make each Steem harder to earn. Looking at some of the economics of the place, Steemmonsters in particular; there's excellent reason to be excited about where we're going this year. Glad you're punching your ticket :)

If I could upload a video to DTube every day, and get the attention of the community, I would be doing quite well. Unfortunately, it's unreliable.

But yeah, it's good to get a few things going. I have started making scheduled posts that will help me enter time specific competitions and so on.

As of a few minutes ago you can delegate out your steemmonsters cards for passive income, too.
Not sure how lucrative it'll be; but every bit helps.

Where is this done? Is this a Maverick only option?

No, it's for everyone. Just trying to figure it out now. If you pick a specific card in your collection there's now a Delegate button.
Jarvie and Asgarth (the peakmonsters team) are working on a marketplace; so it looks like we'll be able to give them authority to delegate on our behalf, and they'll send us the income (minus a small admin fee). Very early days though. Delegation is literally 15 mins old :)
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Sounds like a very eventful trip!! Wow so much happened to you! Hope the experience is good even if it had some hard moments!!

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One of the down sides of leaving the 'comfort zone' is that it's uncomfortable. There are many learning experiences and things that can go wrong. One of the plus sides of leaving the comfort zone is that it expands. Things get easier in our minds. Flying to Sydney from Adelaide isn't scary any more. Flying overseas should be an easy next step for me. I should be going to Sydney later this year and explore the forests in Bega, NSW.

But I also would like to travel overseas. It's not as scary going through the airport and so forth.

Yay that it’s helped you want to explore more places and venture overseas!! I would say overseas is harder unless you visit English speaking places hehe

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That's where I'll start then see what happens.

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That's where I'll start then see what happens.

Posted using Partiko Android

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