Preperation

To the extend it is possible to get Net access I will try to blog frequently, and please remember that English is my second language. Hopefully I spell better than this poor bloke: 

The planning started back in 2009 for the tour to commence in 2010, but due to circumstance it has been postponed until now. 


Team Benns

First I had to find a Travel Agency and after some search on the Web the choice fell on Team Benns. It turned out to be a very good choice. After a few questions about travel preferences my travel agent - Maria - suggested a travel package just to my liking.

I have been a boy scout for 12 years and have been doing the "live in the nature" bit. I have done the backpack traveling, and done my fair share of traveling on turist class. When it comes to primitive living and cheap traveling I have been through the mill.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. 

So the general theme in the User Requirement Specification Maria had to work with for designing the tour was: A high level of comfort regarding traveling and accommodations. 

Maria quickly tuned in on the message and suggested a package including Melbourne, Sydney and two five day trips by car.

Australian Open

If you look into the statistics, Denmark has a higher ratio of Championships and Gold medals per capita than average. You might argue we are a sports interested nation, and we are very good at sports. Let’s use Football as an example. There are more registered football players in Germany than inhabitants in Denmark. Yet we can beat them any given Sunday, for instance in the final at the European Championship in 1992, just to mention one example. 

I am very interested in tennis in general, and especially in how well Denmark's tennis darling Caroline Wozniacki is doing. For now she is ranked number one at the WTA ranking list second consecutive year.
Being in Melbourne at the same time Australian Open 2012 is taking place, I just had to get tickets to the semi-finals and finals in the women’s tournament in order not to miss an opportunity to see some World Class tennis - and hopefully being able to see a Dane win the tournament.

It was not an easy task sitting in Denmark trying to get tickets to a sports event on the other side of the world. But with a little bit of luck I managed to buy the tickets in a close race with the clock.

  

I had no clue what so ever on how to obtain tickets to AO 2012. After some Googleing it was obvious that TicketCity was the only authorized dealership of AO tickets. But I did not have a good gut feeling using them. I wanted to go to the source, and started to investigate the AO 2012 homepage. I found a membership page and learned that membership was the way ahead. So I joined and mailed the AO back office about buying tickets. I got a mail back from Marc writing that pre-sale did not open before fall.

As pre-sale approached I started to mail Marc again but got no answer. A few days before pre-sale started I found out by chance that it was possible to up-grade my membership status to a category with guaranteed access to the finals. A few days after I up-graded my membership, I got a mail from Marc saying:

 "Just a reminder that your ticket order forms for pre-sale access to purchase tickets to Australian Open 2012 must be returned by 5.00pm Tuesday 16th August 2011."

5:00 PM Melbourne means 7:00 AM in DK.

I received the mail Aug. 15th. AM, but did not checked my mail before 11:45 PM. This meant I had 7 hours and 15 minutes to the deadline.

What happens next is not suitable for describing at a blog, it involves figuring out the tournament schedule , figuring out which events to get tickets to, uninstall the printer, install the printer, and a lot of foul wording shouted at the PC - Yes PC - as I was between MacBook's due to lightning  struck my old MacBook.

I will spare you the ugly details - I pressed "Send" at 5:00 AM with 2 hours to spare and went straight to bed.


I was not the first to meet in at work that morning.

iPad or MacBook

Preparing for writing this blog was not  a "Just Do It" either. Back in Marts/April - approximately at the same time the trip was booked - I bought an iPad for the purpose of using it to write some sort of travel log. At that time I did not know I would blog. Next I bought a lot of different notebook apps and diary apps - but none came close to meet my expectations. The software that came closest was "Pages", but the functionality in the iPad version is limited compared to "Pages" on my MacBook. 

I became an Apple freak while visiting a friend in Minneapolis. During a visit to the Mall (MoA) I went in to an Apple Store, and after a few minutes using a Mac I decided: No more PC.

So it hurts to come to the conclusion that my iPad do not suit the purpose. To make a long story short I ended up with bringing my MacBook. That in turn gave difficulties to choice of bag / suitcase to take on board, because a 17 inch laptop do not fit in a normal sized photo-backpack.

Photography
Photography is an old interest of mine now getting a renaissance.


Going to Australia I didn't want to bring a Pocket Camera. I wanted to bring a Camera being able to take high quality pictures. So as a part of the preparation I bought a Canon EOS 600D (That is a Rebel T3i in US terms) back in May in order to get acquainted with the functionality's well before departure.

Beware!  Before you enter the world of photografy you should set a limit on how much you want to spend. Let me elaborate...

First of course you buy the books, and photo books are not in the cheap end of the scale. Next you buy a lot of super expensive photo-magazines to read about tests and reviews. You decide for a make and a model and buy: A camera with the standard 18-135 mm Zoom lens, a memory card, a UV-filter, an extra battery and a photo-bag, thinking it will do - it won't.

After a short while you will need an extra lens (you actually need at least two extra lenses, but you don't know it yet). First you buy the sensible 70-300 Zoom lens, then you buy a 24-70 mm  Zoom with fast glass. Your photo-bag is now much to small and you need to have a some what bigger photo-backpack.

Now we are happy and ready to go photo-hunting for the perfect picture - except for the two UV-filters you forgot to buy for the new lenses. At the store you realize it is impossible to take night pictures and do panorama pictures without a tripod, and instead of coming home with two UV-filters you are bringing home: Two UV-filters, a tripod, a wireless remote and a special made bracket for your camera so it is centered when you mount it in a 90 degree turn on the tripod.

When you have learned to know all features on the camera, a painfully awareness start to be awakened that some very usefull features are missing on your model, but they can be found on an other and more expensive model. For a month or so you are convinced that two cameras is a good solution, but have enough sense to instead opting for: A flash, a printer and some photo-paper.


At this point in time you realize the necessity of a decent (which translates into expensive) piece of software to manipulate the pictures so it doesn't look like you have been using a pocket camera!