Vivid 2016

Today marks a historic time for my blog, my first non-running related blog post! However; before I delve into my adventures, I’m going to change up the rules of my blog a little. In my first blog post I said that I was going to write about running every week, it turns out that’s very hard to do so instead I’m just going to try and put up a blog post every week. (I unfortunately had a case of the man-flu last week and after I got home from work I couldn't bring myself to sit in front of a computer and type this entry up). The majority of those will be on running but every now and then I’ll write about something a bit different, such as now!

So what did I get up to you may be asking, well if you’ve been following my Instagram then you would’ve seen that over the past long weekend I was in Sydney to see Vivid. I only found out I was definitely going on Tuesday (the 7^th June) when my dad found out that he was going to Canada for a work trip, so I stole his ticket and went up to Sydney with my mum. All was not smooth sailing though, as we got to the airport 25 mins before the plane was due to leave, 5 minutes too late as you had to check in half an hour before the plane left. We didn’t realise this at the time as we hardly fly domestically and also wasn’t aware you could check in on your phone, if we had known we wouldn’t have missed our 3pm flight. Which was a problem for me as on that Saturday was Curve Ball, an EDM festival, which started at 3pm. The next available flight was at 6pm, so we took it after lots of discussion as we had to buy new tickets, which meant I didn’t get to the festival until about 8:15 missing the majority of it. I did get to see the headline act though, and I have to say ZHU is amazing. He had the crowd in a frenzy and was amazing to be part of, so glad that I was able to see him. It would have probably helped that the venue, Carriageworks, is an empty industrial warehouse, which meant lots of people were packed into a relatively small space. I thought it was much better than doing it outside and I only wish I was there earlier to see more sets, oh well.

Sunday day consisted of mostly shopping to kill the time before Sunday night, so I put it to good use and tried to find out as much info and try on as much trail running gear I could find. The good news is that there is soo many options out there, and I found out a lot of stuff; such as merino wool is probably the best material for a base layer and that 20000 mm of Hydrostatic Head is a good level of waterproofness for a rain jacket. I didn’t find many trail running packs though, so that’ll be a job for me to do next time I’m in Melbourne. 

All that walking around works up a thirst and for the first time I was able to get a beer a ‘The Lord Nelson’. ‘The Lord Nelson’ is an iconic pub (debated to be the oldest in Australia)and something of a ritual for my dad and his friend Andrew. Andrew and his wife Julie have been long time friends of my parents; live in Sydney and whom we stayed with while my mum and I were there (thanks for that!) Every time we visit Sydney they’ve been kind enough to allow us to stay with them, and every time I’m there with dad, he and Andrew go to ‘The Lord Nelson’ and I often tag along. So it was with great excitement that for the first time I was able to grab a beer there, which was brewed onsite. It was unreal, so my advice, get yourself down to ‘The Rocks’ and get a beer, you can thank me later ;)

Night finally arrived and I got to see some lights, and they were amazing. I spent my time centred around Circular Quay and I was impressed, my favourite was Customs House where they had a little movie play out onto it. Though the Oprah House and the Museum of Contemporary Art were also excellent. On the Monday we left for home, very glad that we did make the trip up.

Vivid runs for about month each year, all across Sydney so I definitely recommend trying to be in Sydney at that time of the year to go see it.

The TRN