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TYPE OF TRAVEL

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A weekend escape to Franschhoek

SOUTH AFRICA

A weekend escape to Franschhoek

FOLLOW THE JOURNEY:

For a girl who couldn’t sit still, suddenly that

For a girl who couldn’t sit still, suddenly that’s all I can do... 📝📖 this memoir has been eight years in the making with as many break ups, bad decisions, lost luggage and loneliness. I hope it lives in your heart like it has mine 🖤 p.s. more details coming soon! In the meantime, my radio silence on here means more words on the pages. ~ Brooke

[Stories s02] When the models made their final lap

[Stories s02] When the models made their final lap of the runway, I slid out from my seat and made a beeline for the open bar. THAT is why you go to fashion shows, people. There’s an endless stream of free booze and bite-sized food called canapés, which I still think is a name the French made up for under-catering events.

My parents always told me there is safety in numbers, so I wasted no time befriending two lovely ladies from Texas who were also in town for the event and similarly displeased (as I’d expect for Texans) by the tiny food portions. Those poor waiters started avoiding our table after we’d wipe a tray clean! The goat’s cheese tartlets didn’t stand a chance.

In classic style of the character I play in my own life, I start knocking back glasses of champagne. One…two….three…MORE! In a room full of sexy people and six foot something models, I find comfort in knowing champagne gets you drunk faster (its a fact, according to a quick google search). And google never lies more than the guys I date, so?

Somewhere approaching 10:00pm he finds me. In a sea of beautiful people just standing there *being* beautiful, I’m the girl falling over herself telling a story to my new friends from Texas. But I’m not just telling a story, I’m re-enacting it. With hand gestures. With full body movements. All of my limbs… all of the volume! “There you are” he spoke softly. “I’ve been looking for you all night”. He has? “You have?” I respond. “But of course!” He says with a grin. Ahh, the Spanish. They find a way to make something so ordinary sound like as if it were a romance novel coming to life. “Would you like to dance?” He asks rhetorically with his hand already extended, ready to take mine.

I do a quick scout of the crowd around me, who I’m sure I haven’t seen dancing all night. But in that moment of quickly turning, the room is suddenly turning with me, spinning, and without intending to, I’m half way to the floor when he catches me.
To be continued…🍷🍷🍷

[Stories s02] I don’t want to make all these sto

[Stories s02] I don’t want to make all these stories about the guys I’ve dated, so let’s talk about some of the guys I haven’t dated. If this were an episode, the opening credits would roll... “How to make men fall in love with you: Be Unavailable”. The year is 2016 and I’ve just landed in Barcelona. The first time I visited this city I didn’t quite fall in love with it, which probably had something to do with the fact I was robbed in broad daylight. Twenty-two year old me didn’t know any better, but if you want to get mugged, go to Las Ramblas.
By the time I returned age twenty six, I was better prepared. With my credit card stuffed inside my bra, I made my way to the Passeig de Gràcia to fetch an outfit for that evening. I was heading to a fashion show that night, which is a long story in itself. My fashion “sense” is somewhere between Lisa Kudrow’s character on Friends and confused. It leans more towards the latter.

That evening, I slipped on a chiffon floral dress and my strappy black heels. In retrospect neither of them co-ordinated with one another, but I’m not the kind of girl who travels with “options”. I downed a bottle of champagne from the mini-bar (which my credit card would later regret) for a safe dosage of dutch courage. I was going in alone.

As the taxi driver declared we had arrived, I started scrolling through my phone for the invite. I knew it was in there somewhere! It was like my teenage years of rocking up to parties alone were flashing right before my eyes. Then I saw him.

He was standing at the entrance in a tuxedo that said he belonged.. and he was waving at *me*. A former version of myself might have been googley-eyed by the scene I’m setting. But 2016 me knew better. I had a boyfriend, for one! But I’d left home two weeks ago and he still hadn’t called to check in. We were - parting ways. In the painfully slow, drawn out way you do in your twenties. You know, when everyone knows it is over before you do?

To be continued…🍷

[Stories pt. XXVII] This was me a month after I wa

[Stories pt. XXVII] This was me a month after I was dumped on Christmas Day. After the shock had worn off and my mum went from consoling me to bothering me (lol sorry mum), I did what any responsible girl in her late twenties would do when she has her heart broken: I ran away.

First I ran to New Zealand, then I ran to Bali. Both were only a few hours from Australia and January is a pretty cheap time to fly, so I listened to my friends advice to “catch flights, not feelings”. There are a few details I overlooked from that Christmas dinner, most of which you’ll find here.
1. Somewhere between starters and the main course I had made the seemingly absurd request to put a label on our romance. I asked in the same kind of way a teenager would ask for permission to stay at a friends house, knowing the answer was probably no.

2. His response was loud, unapologetic and caused the entire restaurant to turn their heads.

3. I was pissed off, so I did what any girl pissed off does in an argument with a six-foot-two man-child. I stayed silent.

4. We walked home, a miserable 2.1 kilometres in the cold December air. A city that had seemed so magical just one day prior suddenly felt cold and not just in a literal sense.

5. When we arrived back at the apartment some forty minutes later, he wasted no time creating a makeshift office on the far end of the dining table. I didn’t know it then, but he was booking a flight home.

6. Simon left at 3:55am the following morning. The euros were a nice gesture, all things considered. On the 26th of December we were due to collect a rental car, drive 3 hours West to a cabin I had booked for a staggering €500 a night. I booked three nights, non-refundable. The euros were to pay for the rental car which was booked in his name, as I was paying the accommodation and he was covering transport.

7. Also non-refundable was the hotel in Salzburg and Paris on New Years Eve. Add that to my $5,236.12 flight home and yeah, you get the idea.

8. I wanted to stay and be the “strong, independent, solo travel gal” I marketed myself as. But this broke me in a way I didn’t think anything or anyone could. Maybe I always was...?

[Stories pt. XXVI] The next day, which also happen

[Stories pt. XXVI] The next day, which also happened to be Christmas day, Simon phoned six restaurants to book us a table for Christmas lunch. Everywhere was fully booked (no shocker there) so we settled on the dinner reservation I had already made at a traditional Viennese restaurant in the inner stadt.

With the supermarkets closed since the 24th of December, my backup plan was to venture out for a big breakfast, skip lunch, and celebrate Christmas with a schnitzel and apple strudel.
But my plan was floored. My counterpart hit the snooze button on his alarm no fewer than seven times. And while I’d normally make an exception for someone sleeping in ’til noon… this was Christmas?

I bounced out of bed, danced around the living room to Ariana Grande’s Christmas tunes and drank all the coffee in the house to keep my hunger at bay. Meanwhile Simon slept.

A crucial point in this story is that I’m not much fun to be around if I skip a meal. I’m the kind of person who snacks on 6 small meals a day and I’m also the kind of person to eat before a workout. In other words, I really like food. A lot.

So there we were on my favourite day of the year, phoning around to see if anyone could seat us for lunch. After six consecutive “Nein”s, he finally gave up. Now he was hungry. It was going from bad to worse.
As soon as we left the apartment, the rain started. We didn’t have an umbrella so we went back inside to layer up and continue our quest to be fed.

Anywhere that was open was booked out. It wasn’t surprising, but it was still disappointing nonetheless. As we aimlessly wandered through the heart of Vienna and the rain picked up pace, I spotted a movie theatre sign up a small alleyway. “That’s it!” I proclaimed. “We can go see a movie!” He wasn’t nearly as pleased.

As we sat through the two hours and ten minutes of chim-chimeny and spoonfuls of sugar, we stuffed ourselves on popcorn and zero sugar coke. By the end of the film, I fell out of love with my favourite childhood classic. I fell out of love with Christmas.

[Stories pt. XXV] Being dumped on Christmas Day is

[Stories pt. XXV] Being dumped on Christmas Day is a pretty good dinner conversation topic. It is also a great way to make friends on airplanes (mostly stewardesses) and mostly after a few too many wines at altitude.
I had four planes worth of stories to tell as I travelled from Vienna - Paris. Paris - Singapore. Singapore - Melbourne. Melbourne - home.

The day after Christmas as I sit at one end of the dining table in my rented Viennese apartment, a stack of €100 bills sat at the other. Instead of leaving a note, Simon left euros. He left at 3:55am in the morning and the only reason I know this is because I glanced at my iPhone screen when I heard the door click shut, not because he bothered to say goodbye - or - say anything.

What happened in the lead up to Christmas Day is a series of unfortunate events. Much like a Lemony Snicket’s tale, our Christmas holiday went from bad to worse in the 72 hour lead up to his disappearance.

I arrived in Vienna a few days before him and filled my days with coffee houses, Christmas shopping and organic wine sourcing. I visited three organic wine stores across town, making it a personal mission to fill the house with everything he loved.

I bought a polaroid camera for his Christmas present, one that he would later leave behind and one that I still have in my possession to this day. Simon was a non-social media guy (he’d be the first to tell you that), so I figured he could use the vintage camera to photograph our trip and take a memory of us home. From our dates in Los Angeles to our rendezvous in London, we never took a single photo to suggest that we ever existed - or he ever existed.
Sometimes I don’t think he ever did, but I still see his face in my dreams sometimes and I’m reminded he was real. Just, what we had was not.
In German countries, Christmas Eve is the main event. I know this now because the supermarkets were closed by the time he landed and we quickly realised there would be no way to fill the fridge for the Christmas feast I had planned. “Oh well” he reasoned as we stood outside the third Billa Supermarket in search of food. “I guess we’ll go out for Christmas lunch” he concluded.

To be cont

[Stories pt. XXIV] There is no better time to be i

[Stories pt. XXIV] There is no better time to be in London than at Christmas. This is an undeniable fact.

As soon as Simon left London and I sunk into even more uncertainty, I called up an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a while. “Are you free tonight for some Christmas fun?” I fought back the tears. The last thing I needed was to verbalise my uncertainty and make it somehow feel more real.

My friend had been living in London a few years now, working her way up in the broadcasting world. A true ray of sunshine, she’s one of those friends who will always pick you up when you are down. No questions asked, she will be there the second you call.

We met at Hyde Park which had been transformed into winter wonderland (quite literally, that’s what they call it). We spent the evening getting drunk on gluhwein and the 6.3grams of sugar per serve. Part tipsy part sugar coma, we laughed almost the entire walk home. It wasn’t until we reached Oxford Circus that I finally told her about the guy I had been seeing. “Woah, you held that in all night?” she responded. Ever the optimist, she assured me that my worries were my own insecurities and that everything would be fine when we met at the next rendezvous point, on the eve of Christmas Eve in Vienna.

She didn’t know it then, but a month later I would be calling her on the day after Christmas, sobbing so incoherently that she could barely make sense of each word, let alone string together a sentence. As she sat in the stairwell of CNN with a million better things to be doing (like delivering the holiday news), she sat with me until I had managed to book a flight home. Simon had disappeared in the middle of the night and it was if he never existed at all.

So I’m sure you’re wondering, how could it be? If I was so uncertain about him already, why would I see him again in Vienna? Why did he show up either?
Sometimes we focus all our energy on making something work, instead of thinking about whether or not it actually should.

To be continued… 🍷 #storiesseries

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