Musings & More

Queensland: Koalas, The Rainforest and The Great Barrier Reef

When deciding our itinerary, the amount of time we had available meant that we needed to choose between doing the Whitsunday Islands or the Great Barrier Reef. As incredible as the Whitsunday’s looked (I couldn’t stop looking at photos online), there was something even more exciting about the chance to visit the Great Barrier Reef and after all, who knew how long left we had to see it? After lots of research, I settled on a base of Port Douglas, an hour’s drive from Cairns where we would be flying to from Sydney, a quick domestic flight of roughly three hours.

Our Airbnb was a spacious apartment that sat within the Hibiscus Hotel & Spa, whose facilities we were able to access. It was a lovely and clean with Balinese inspired décor and two gorgeous pools with floating bean bags, which were the comfiest things and we proceeded to spend our first day floating around on, preparing for our final week.
View Post

Emily x

When in Sydney

I’m ashamed to say that there was no particular reason why I wanted to visit Sydney. It was just one of those places you know you want to visit and when Matt and I first started talking about this big holiday, it made sense that while we over New Zealand way, to make a stop there too. A big factor was of course that we knew we would be away over New Year and where better to spend it than Sydney?

View Post

Emily x

New Zealand

NEW ZEALAND: EXPLORING THE NORTH ISLAND

Well hello there! Long time no see eh?

After so much time planning our dream trip to New Zealand and Australia and finally jetting off in December 2018, it’s crazy to be back in the UK, digesting it all. I’m still slightly shell-shocked at how much we’ve done and what an incredible experience it’s been and I wanted to write down in more detail what we got up to, in case any of you are thinking of doing something similar and so I have a place to relive the memories in detail. For ease of reading, I’ll be breaking the trip down into three parts, New Zealand, Sydney and Queensland. I have decided to only include key parts as quite honestly, this post would go on for ages!

View Post

Emily x

A short goodbye

dream-holiday-2

After over a year of planning, when this post goes live I will be two days away from jetting away to New Zealand an Australia for three long weeks over Christmas and New Year! If you want to read more about our travel plans you can do so here.

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to happen with my blog while I was away and there was only ever one solution. So from this post onwards, I will be taking a break from blogging with my next blog post going up on the 20th of January. Yes, I could have prewritten posts to go up while I was travelling but the temptation to check on how the post was doing and to reply to comments would be too great and I promised myself that my only concern needed to be dedicated to absorbing every moment of the beautiful countries we were exploring. Y’know, mindfulness and all that.

I can’t pretend that my current relationship with blogging has nothing to do with my decision either. I’ve spoken before about my struggles with blogging and while I definitely a bit more comfortable with the content decisions I’ve made, I still find it difficult to balance blogging with my full-time job while wanting to have a social life and some down time too. So yes, admittedly I’m excited to have some time away from Musings & More but I’m also looking forward to creating posts on our experience in Australia and New Zealand when we return. If you have any recommendations whatsoever for New Zealand, Sydney or Port Douglas/Cairns area, please let me know!

I’ll still be tweeting now and again and I’ll be promoting older posts you may have missed, but if you’re interested to know what I get up to in the coming weeks, make sure you’re following me on Instagram. There I’ll be posting pictures and (hopefully) making you jealous over on Instagram stories.

But ultimately, I will be back and I hope you’ll stick around because there’s plenty more to come.

Emily x

Unique gift experiences with Buyagift*

It’s coming to that time of year.

“What do you want for Christmas?”
“Er dunno. What about you?”
“I’m not sure…”

Choosing what you want for Christmas used to be so much easier as a child. I used to love flipping through the Argos catalogue with my sister; drawing big circles around the toys we wanted. But now, as an adult, there’s not too much I’m in need of. Money is great, of course, but I always find I very rarely actually spend it on anything decent. Instead, it ends up being spent on stuff like petrol or coffee.
View Post

Emily x