Melbourne Wellness Summit - Aug. 16-18, 2013

Unfortunately, Ryan and I really didn't spend much time in Melbourne during the years we lived in Australia.  Melbourne is known for amazing food, a great art scene, and I think it's quite different from Sydney.  So when I got to go for the Wellness Summit, I wanted to make the most of it.  Ryan couldn't come, but Brett and Janah were there, even though I didn't spend a ton of time with them.  

One thing I had heard about was the interesting graffiti in alley ways, so I did some research and looked up the best places to check out.  I guess I probably should have been nervous by myself at night, but that's the beauty of Melbourne!  Everything was actually really well-lit, and I really never felt unsafe.  The artists were quite prolific - even the dumpsters were painted!  I only had a short time to explore on the first night so I wandered around and made the most of it.

The next morning we went down to the conference area bright and early to get set up for the day.  Because I co-hosted That Paleo Show, and the summit was put on by The Wellness Couch network, I got a table to promo our show and my coaching.  It was so fun to get to talk to our fans, and talk to people about their experience with the wellness industry.  We also got a lot of people interested in our course about how to be a wellness coach.



And the venue was packed!  600+ people, and some amazing speakers.  It was a really fun event.

After everything was cleaned up, I did a tiny bit more exploring before falling into bed.  I think it was my first time in a major casino (and certainly the biggest conference centre/hotel/mall/casino I've been in), and I was shocked at how everything was still open at midnight.  A Pink concert had just finished and there were people everywhere.  It was nearly impossible to find my way back to the hotel after exploring...that's how they getcha!  

The trip was super short and sweet, but I'm glad I at least got to see a little bit of Melbourne.

The Great Ocean Walk - Day 6 (April 13 and 14, 2013) - The End

On the last morning we were both spent after having had a terrible sleep and being pretty stiff and sore.  When we woke up it was raining a bit, so we just decided to pack up early, have some breakfast, and get on our way.  We were hiking by 8am because we wanted to finish as early as possible. 

We decided not to follow the trail and instead we took an old road inland.  We thought it might be a little less hilly since it wasn't along the cliff, and we thought it would be a smoother walk.  It probably was, but it was still sandy and pretty rough - I wouldn't have wanted to be driving on it, that's for sure!  Despite Ryan's knee, he motored along and basically dragged me along.  He was definitely a man on a mission.

We saw a few swamp wallabies and some nice birds, but overall it was pretty uneventful.  In the end we made it to the check point half an hour ahead of schedule.

We walked through a little town near the river and past a bit of a camping area.  There were some kids playing in the water, and one kid who was kind of hesitating getting in the water because I imagine it was pretty cold.  We all know I'm not great with kids, but I thought I'd make an effort and encourage him to get in the water.  I told him that if he didn't get in the water quickly he would get leeches on his feet (which of course probably wasn't true here, but definitely was true as a kid in northern Quebec lakes), but instead of encouraging him he totally freaked out and ran out of the water.  Oops!  Ryan's just keeping me away from children from now on I think…

As we left the town and hiked our final stretch, the houses we left behind reminded Ryan of his childhood spent in Newfoundland, so we were slightly distracted for the painful last few hours.

And then we hiked over dunes, boardwalks, and through scrub.  The bushes were just tall enough that we couldn't see over them, and just close enough to the path for us to be worried about snakes.  Nonetheless, I still managed to tease Ryan about hobbling like an old man.  Though again, he never complained.  If anything it was me that was doing that!

And finally, after 6 days of hiking, we got our first view of the landmark 12 Apostles!

We still had some hiking to do after that, but once we saw them our spirits lifted because we knew we were on the home stretch.  We rested briefly, but it was only brief because when we sat down we found tons more of the red inch ants!  Ryan definitely didn't want to get bitten again, so we continued on our way.

Then we reached the "fake" ending of the hike where we got a lovely photo op just before the rain started. 

After our final 10 minutes of hiking Ryan ceremoniously got rid of his walking stick, we found our trailer, and the driver took our picture.

Before leaving the Great Ocean Walk/Road for good, he took us to the official tourist site for the 12 Apostles.  We didn't realize we were in for a bit of a walk there, but at least we didn't have our packs and it was on a cement path.  We did our quick photo shoot with the hundreds of other people and then finally left for good.

I have to say, there really is something satisfying about completing a giant hike like that even though you don't feel it at the time.  Looking back I'm extremely proud of what we accomplished, and it's cool to have such a unique experience.  It wasn't until we were at the tourist centre that we realized how lucky we were to be away from the crowds and get such a different view of the Australian coast.  For once we actually took the time to have an experience, and it was definitely worth it.

The driver delivered us safely back to our car in Apollo Bay (the 1.25 hour drive took us 6 days to hike!), we got some lunch, and then started our drive back to Melbourne.  On the way we stopped at Bells Beach, which had recently been the site for one of the world surfing competitions.  They were taking the grandstands down, and still there were hundreds of cars in the parking lot which presumably belonged to the hundreds of surfers in the water.  There were of course some spectators, but it was really cool to see the best surfers in Australia messing around at one of the top surfing sites in the world.  It was especially funny to see all of the vans in the parking lot, and even older guys with long blonde hair in wet suits getting ready to surf.  It was so stereotypical, and definitely worth the stop!

As a reward for completing the hike, I had bought a cheap voucher for one of Melbourne's most posh hotels: the historic Hotel Windsor.  We knew we wouldn't want to tour around the city, so this was the next best thing.  Unfortunately, it took us awhile to get there.  For some reason Ryan had in the GPS that we were going to the Windsor suburb, so needless to say it took us a little longer than expected to get there!  But we got there in the end around 6:30pm, and it was seriously worth the wait.

We pulled up out front of the hotel, and a valet came and took our bags and parked our car.  Of course we had backpacks and duffle bags, so we looked extremely out of place walking into the lobby with chandeliers and an entire wedding party.  But Melbourne is a friendly city and the bride and groom joked with us saying they were glad they're not the only ones to travel with backpacks!  The staff made us feel very welcome despite our smell, but we were relieved when we were finally in the room.

The package included a bottle of sparkling wine, which was chilled for us upon arrival.  Our first priority was to shower, but I decided to have the best of both worlds and have some wine IN the shower.  Life's hard!

We ordered delicious room service (of course way too much food) and enjoyed it in our robes.

Now, one fun thing about the Hotel Windsor is that they have a pillow menu.  That means they have a list of pillows you can choose from, and then they bring it up to your room.  Yes, this is extravagant, but since it was included I of course wanted to make the most of it!  So Ryan ordered the "posture perfect" pillow and I ordered the "aromatherapy" pillow, not really sure what to expect.  Shortly thereafter our pillows were delivered, but I was a bit surprised that mine smelled like, well, pillow, not the lavender loveliness I was expecting.  I of course wanted to exchange it, because it was obviously a mistake, but Ryan tried to talk me out of it.  He was absolutely mortified when I called the front desk, but in the end it turns out they HAD sent me the wrong pillow and I got to enjoy the rest of the evening smelling glorious.

Once everything was sorted we rented the movie "Robot + Frank" on pay-per-view and ate our delicious desserts in bed.  Needless to say we were passed out in a food/hike coma by 9:30 pm.  What a wicked way to end the trip!

The next morning we went down to enjoy our complimentary breakfast, which was soooo lavish.  The tea was served on actual china with actual silverware!  There was every wonderful indulgence you could possibly imagine for breakfast, and I made the most of it.  I especially enjoyed the unlimited supply of strawberries and blue cheese!

And then, suddenly, everything was over and we were off to the airport to get back to reality.  I must say, if you want to just ignore the world for an entire week, do what we did!

The Great Ocean Walk - Prequel

Sometimes you don't know how much you can achieve until you push yourself past your comfort zone and into new territory.  Our most recent adventure was a 6-day, 91 kilometre hike called The Great Ocean Walk.  Many people are familiar with the Great Ocean Road, which is supposedly the most scenic drive in Australia, just west of Melbourne.

The map below shows the Great Ocean ROAD, but the walking trail followed the coast most of the time.  For a map of what we actually hiked, look here.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, then you know that although Ryan and I like nature we tend to avoid extreme nature experiences.  Usually we use time as the excuse because we like to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, but really I think it's just easier to travel by car and hotel, and it takes a lot less planning and training.  Not this time!  The Great Ocean Road didn't appeal to us for some reason, but since it was one of those "must-do" Australian experiences, we decided to do it our way. 

As I said, a trip like this requires a lot of planning.  Instead, I found a company called Walk 91 that books everything for you!  We booked flights and a car, they planned our walking itinerary, booked our camp sites,  booked one night accommodation in the middle of the hike,  and coordinated food/gear drops and transportation.  This appealed to us since our camping gear isn't really "backpacking" gear, so it wouldn't have been ideal to carry that and food for 6 days. 

Although that bit was easy to plan, we still had to decide on food for the trip.  In the past this would have been easy, but since going Paleo it presented more of a challenge.  You all know me, so instead of taking the easy way out I decided to see how close to Paleo we could get for the entire trip, which meant no easy pasta or granola bars.  Lucky for me one of my coaching clients offered to lend me her dehydrator, so I got to work weeks ahead dehydrating as much as I could in preparation.  I did tons of beef jerky, squash, broccoli, apples, fruit bark, and even some rice (which was actually as non-Paleo as we got).  I also made bags of home made nut granola, chia seed porridge, and bought some awesome tuna and coconut butter online.  I won't lie, I would have liked to just do it the old way but it was very satisfying when it was all done.  Plus I knew we would need every last ounce of energy on the trip, and I wasn't letting gluten take that away from me!

So Friday night Ryan came home, and Saturday we packed everything.  Over the past 2 weeks we had been coordinating our meals and packing lists in a Google doc, so packing was really easy.  We even had time to relax on Saturday before our Sunday departure.  It worked out well since it was daylight savings that weekend, so we got an extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning and a lazy trip to the airport for our 9:40am flight.  Much better than the usual 6am ones!  The trip was uneventful since both Ryan and I bought new books at the airport.  Once in Melbourne we picked up our car and drove straight to Geelong (1 hour away) to have lunch and do some grocery shopping.

Geelong was a nice town on the ocean, but we couldn't really decide what to have for lunch so we ended up at a Thai place.  Our first clue should have been that no one was at the restaurant, but we weren't thinking straight I guess.  Our appetizer came to us with raw chicken so we obviously sent that back, and the mains tasted good but made us feel queasy afterwards. 

Grocery shopping didn't go much better for us.  We should have just started at the biggest store, but instead we thought we'd see what we could find at the health food shop.  We didn't find much, so we went to the IGA next door which was pretty derelict, so we still had to go to the third major grocery store.  We got everything we wanted, but it took a lot more time than it should have and we were pretty fried by the end of it.  Much to our dismay, what we thought was a 20 minute drive to Apollo Bay turned out to be 2 hours (don't know where Ryan got the 20 minutes from).  At least it was a nice drive along the ocean, but it was also quite a windy road which is never good for me.

With our hotel (Beacon Point Ocean View Villas) only 3 km away, we turned off of the highway onto a (still major) side road.  The front tire on the driver's side started to make a weird clacking noise, so thinking it was a stick or something caught there we drove to our hotel and got out to take a look.  Unfortunately, we had run over 2 nails.  The clacking noise was the piece of plastic the nails had been attached to.  Darn!  Since by then it was getting dark we decided to see how it looked in the morning.  As it happened, the spare tire was exactly the same as the normal tire, so the next morning we just changed it and didn't worry about it any more.  Funny enough, for the first time ever we paid for the extra insurance on the car.  Of course that's the time something goes wrong!  Luckily working at the mines we have changed many tires, so it was no big deal.

  

Even after all of the car drama was sorted on Saturday night, we still had to repack everything for the next day and sort all of our food bags.  I forgot to get a picture with all of the food laid out on the floor, but here's the finished product.

We were exhausted after we finished packing, and didn't want to drive on our potentially flat tire, so we ended up just eating random stuff that we bought instead of going out for a nice dinner.  We had been hoping to get one nice meal in before we hiked, but we just started our meal rations a bit early! 

So as you can see, before the hike even started it was an adventure!