16. Mastering solo travel: A perfect week in the Blue Mountains

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Hi, I’m Val Spiers and my intention is to make my life better everyday and share my insights.

In this week’s newsletter my trip planning pays off as I enjoy my time in the Blue Mountains.

I am happy to travel away from home on planes and trains (not boats so much).

My husband is not a happy traveller so he happily stays at home.

I love the excitement of starting a new travel plan. When I realised I could visit family and visit the Blue Mountains I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought of it ages ago. I had just started playing with Chat GPT and wondered if it could write me a 10 day tour itinerary. The only thing I really wanted to do was a tour of some of the Jenolan Caves so I needed some ideas. My actual trip was to be 5 nights. I ended up with lots of ideas to explore and I found several more great activities that were closer to Katoomba and well suited to my short break.

This is not my first solo trip. I have organised trips to Europe and San Francisco and Dunedin and quite a few places in Australia by myself or I have asked my mum to join me. The biggest thing on this latest trip was deciding to hire a car to do some day trips. I had some experience with finding all sorts of places when I did a road trip in Britain in 2012, yet I was excited and nervous to add self driving to my mountains trip.

Here is my comfy accommodation -

Getting the plan together

When I start to plan, I get an idea of what I want to do and see, then I start to look up travel and accommodation. It’s not easy to get all the best prices and still bring it all together. I chose my dates and found accommodation on Stayz. Before booking it I looked up the flights. I booked the accommodation at a reduced price then went straight back to the flights and booked them.

Once they were in place I booked the train to Brisbane. My dates for the train were flexible since I can stay at mum’s. Tilt train bookings in business class are almost impossible to get these days because one train is out for servicing. I had to settle for business one way and economy on the way home. So now I know where I am staying and I have the expensive travel to and from sorted.

Next up is to flesh out my touring plan and work out if I need the car every day. I decided to visit Scenic World on my last full day because it is not far from my accommodation in Katoomba. I took the car back that morning and got a taxi to and from Scenic World. I then had to get a taxi for the short trip to Katoomba train station next morning. That meant one less day to pay for the car.

To save me wondering what the car hire included I rang the Katoomba office of Hertz instead of trying to book online. I booked the car I wanted, arranging payment for when I picked it up. I also found out that a new customer has to put up a $500 bond not just the $200. In 2012 I wasn’t even aware that there was going to be a bond! You learn that lesson fast when you realise that the money doesn’t come back to you until after your holiday.

Any tickets that I could book online in advance I did weeks before my trip. Booking and paying online is preferable for the tourist attraction and the customer. I got reminders of times and places in emails the day before the event and I knew exactly how much I had left to spend on food and souvenirs.

I used my digital planner to collect up all my tickets and screen shots of train timetables. Some tickets went into my phone wallet.

Finally I had to organise getting to the airport. I booked a car and driver to get to Brisbane airport and an air train ticket for getting back to mum’s. I checked the air train time table in Sydney and the train time table to get to Katoomba. I recorded the phone number for Katoomba taxi and Katoomba Hertz and the address of my accommodation.

So, my planning consisted of:

1. Pick a travel dream from my bucket list.

2. Find out what I can do to fill about 5 days…

3. …in a drivable radius of a nice town.

4. Search for accomodation of any kind in that town within my budget.

5. Check flights then book the accommodation.

6. Book the flights.

7. Firm up the itinerary.

8. Book the rental car.

9. Book event/attraction tickets in advance online.

10. Make arrangements for any other travel or details.

The caves were amazing -

Does a positive mindset change the world or change how you experience the world? Or both!

This is where the magic starts. On this trip the bad things solved themselves or were easily dealt with. Some of the good things were a real surprise. Do things work out a certain way because you are primed to accept opportunities and you are primed to accept that all problems have a solution you can find? This is an explanation that I can believe in. The way I think changes everything.

Here are some things about my trip that I found interesting.

The bad thing was I couldn’t get business class seats on the plane when I booked with my limited points.
The good thing was I got to upgrade to Economy X the week before the flight and the middle seat was vacant both ways.

The bad thing was I had to carry my big coat while travelling.
The good thing was for the week I was in the mountains it was 27 degrees Celsius and sunny and clear. This was not normal for March.

The bad thing was I’m hopeless at directions (even with my GPS)
The good thing was I got my phone to tell me where to go even though I hadn’t used it before and I muddled through just fine. I still don’t know what I pushed to make it talk to me the first time.

The bad thing was that I slipped a bit before leaving Brisbane and hurt my knee.
The good thing was I was 2 years into a fabulous exercise routine that made me flexible and strong so I could still do all the walking I had planned.

---

I don’t think there were anymore bad things.

My accommodation was like a home away from home.

There was a bath and bath salts so I could soak after my bushwalking day and my caves tour day.

I just happened to visit Echo Point in the late afternoon to see the Three Sisters bathed in bright afternoon sun.

I managed to buy some shorts and a t-shirt at Big W in a mountains town in autumn.

When I picked up the car it was an almost new hybrid Toyota Corolla (a dream to drive) and the manager said he would drop the bond to $200 just to be nice. I must have looked a bit like a little old lady who would drive carefully???

I heard black cockatoos on several days (a personal high for me) and I found a beautiful children’s book about a female black cockatoo who realised that everything she needed to be confident was already inside her (an emotional moment for me).

The star gazing night I attended had clear skies and I experienced a 3.6 earthquake right there on the lookout on the edge of a sandstone cliff. What a thrill! I still think we were all lucky not to fall into the valley.

I had a wonderful time and even managed to do some good deeds for strangers.

Everything else just went to plan without anything unusual.

The Mt Tomah Botanical Gardens were beautiful -

Replace negative thoughts - it’s a habit I have instilled in myself

There was one thing that bothered me a bit before leaving for the trip. I felt anxious about driving myself around a new place in a strange car (and I had no idea how to work the GPS on my phone). I had to do some serious negative thought removal and work on positive thinking. By the time I left home I was confident that I was going to have a great time driving myself and feeling independent and in control. There were a few hairy moments in a flash thunder storm on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere but I knew I would get through it. What would life be without some scary adventure.

Scenic World had plenty to do -

I think of change as a challenge.

The last 10 years have all been a journey of better and better moments in my life. I have spent lots of time on creating a positive mindset and it is worth every second. I will never stop working at it because each new moment I experience is better than the last. I have never felt so good about my life and all the experiences I am accumulating. I get so excited when I think that if I keep doing what I am with my brain and the rest of my body, life is going to keep getting better. My life before retirement was all working for a living and stressing out when things got hard. After retirement I had a chance to take stock and really work on making the magic happen. And it really does feel like magic even though I know I have done it all myself.

Do I think I could have started earlier? Heck yeah!

Cheers,

Val

Sydney from my plane -

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