My Life in Words

I’m now just wrapping up week 3 of 4 consecutive weeks on the road. Last time I wrote, I was home in Sydney for the weekend after a thrilling week in Northern Queensland. Trip 2: Sydney->Brisbane->Sydney I’m getting used to waking up at 5:30am on Monday’s now…. Not cool. Last Monday, I flew up to Brisbane first thing in the morning and was at the client by 8:30am (which is 9:30am Sydney time – they don’t do daylight savings up north which is crazy because it literally gets light out at 4:30am). So at the start of my workday, I had already been awake for 4 hours. Ugh. After Emerald and Tieri, Brisbane was like a holiday. We were in a really nice hotel right on the riverfront, which included an excellent free buffet breakfast. They also gave us all envelopes when we arrived, which turned out to be about 10 drink vouchers (each!) for the hotel bar! I was also pretty happy about the hotel bed; after weeks on an air mattress, a few nights in a huge lush king bed was pretty

So, I’m into month 2 here in Australia and I will be spending a significant amount of it away from home. Over the course of November I am set to visit 4 mine sites and one shared services centre in 5 different towns across 2 states. I’m pretty much going to be away during the week and back in Sydney on the weekends for the next month. While being away from Sydney is not ideal, given that I was finally just getting settled, the experience so far has actually been quite interesting, so I thought I would discuss it. Trip One: Sydney->Brisbane->Emerald->Tieri->Emerald->Sydney My first trip away was one week long; up to Northern Queensland for 5 days for work at 2 coal mines. I left Sydney Sunday evening and arrived up in Brisbane around 9pm. Its a tough trip because to get to the northern mine site you have to get a very very early flight out of Brisbane on Monday morning... which means we had to spend the night at an airport hotel in Brisbane. I was up at the hor