Results tagged “Sydney” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Lost Girl blogger Amanda Pressner is in Australia for a few weeks and is sharing her finds with us here on IT.

Australia may be the poster country for the Endless Summer, but it might surprise you to know that the sun does actually set in the land down under--and the colder months eventually arrive. So how does Oz's largest and most iconic city manage to cope when the mercury plummets (below 60 degrees!), the sky gets dark at 5 pm and winter gloom threatens to set in?

Well, we're talking about Aussies: They throw a party, of course.

This year marks the kick-off of Vivid Sydney, a cultural extravaganza that's designed to turn the city into a living canvas of light and sound during the winter season. The organizers are already calling it the biggest festival of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Running from May 26th through June 14th, Vivid will feature four major cornerstone events that will take place in and around the city's harborfront.  

The three-week program was originally conceived to give the locals reason to celebrate during a previously sluggish interlude on the Aussie event calendar. Vivid Artistic Director Mary-Anne Kyriakou, who's both a musical composer and a lighting designer, had seen similar festivals in Europe and knew of the uplifting impact that light could have on the mood of an entire city--particularly during the darkest time of the year.

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.

The Jenss family holiday season extends a week or two beyond the traditional parameters of Thanksgiving and New Year's because our children's birthdays fall just before and after those two days. To celebrate Tyler's 12th birthday, we did what many locals do to escape the big city of Sydney during the first week in January--we headed for the nearby Blue Mountains. In many ways, this excursion reminded us a lot of our drives to 'the country' outside the New York metropolitan area, albeit without the dramatic scenery of Wollemi National Park as a backdrop. In our pursuit of avoiding hotels as much as possible on this trip, we found the perfect retreat in Bilpin Springs Lodge: a spacious, self-contained B&B neatly tucked amongst an expanse of gum trees and apple orchards.    

Upon our arrival, we were immediately greeted by the caretaker Tony, who showed us around the homestead where we'd spend the next three days, and the boys made a bee-line to the trampoline parked right on the front lawn. As he ran down the list of all the possible activities to consider around the area, I told him how we just wanted to take a break from the hectic pace we've been on for the last six months and just hang out. He smiled and said, "That's terrific. Not too many of our foreign guests come here and do that. They're usually in and out of here pretty quickly." I figured this was a good sign that we might have the place all to ourselves, and we pretty much did.

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.

As a New Yorker, I've never gone down to Times Square to ring in New Years Eve, nor have I really had any desire to do so. Call me what you will, but enduring the frigid cold to watch a ball drop is not how I wish to celebrate the turning of the calendar. I'm sure people who make the effort have a great time and it's one of those events you've gotta experience at least once, but for me, it's ultimately the thought of being jammed together with a mass of humanity that's the biggest deterrent. So why would I choose to be in Sydney on this particular New Years, especially with two kids in tow?

This year is quite different for our family, and so is Sydney. December 31, 2008 not only marked the end of one of the most memorable years of our lives, it represented the halfway point of a yearlong-round-the-world journey that began six months ago. As we were putting together the itinerary before we took off, we projected ourselves in Australia during this time frame and figured there was only one place we could possibly be to celebrate the occasion. Sure, we might have to contend with a substantial crowd down by the harbor, but at least there'd be no freezing temperatures (it's the middle of summer down under). This would definitely make the whole thing more tolerable, and besides, we'd get to watch one of the most magnificent fireworks displays found anywhere.