Western Australia

Telstra has sponsored me to share my experience of using a Telstra 4G Mobile Broadband device while on holiday.

This was a no-brainer, since over the New Year break, our family headed down to the Great Southern Region of Western Australia – a place famous for its big trees, lush forests, sparkling rivers, amazing beaches, wines, cheeses and chocolates.

We stayed on a remote farm with friends and their kids. We did lots of fantastic activities like boating, fishing, swimming, bush walking, building go karts, riding on quad bikes, driving around the farm on the tractor and ute.

It was so much fun!

Now, we have a pretty strict rule when on holiday, that we do not check our work emails. That’s the point of the holiday is to get AWAY from all of that, right?

But this year, we wanted our kids to be able to Skype with their grandpa everyday while on holidays. He has been a bit sick recently, so we wanted to stay in close contact with him and to cheer him up with all our photos and stories.

So we gave the kids a digital camera and let them take snap shots of all their adventures and favourite holiday moments, which we uploaded to an online photo album. Then they would Skype with him while they all viewed the online photos at the same time.

Here are some pics they took.

My big boys messing about on a parked quad bike.

The dads and kids made a go kart and took turns to roll down the hill.

Er yep, this is what happens when you let a 8 year old take photos of “interesting” things during his holiday trip!

Some other ways we used the device to make our holiday better:

We planned to do a bit of bush exploring and wanted to find the location of a waterfall picnic area that we had heard of. So we used the device to help us look up maps and information of the region, and showed the kids where our next adventure was going to be.

And one night we streamed a 58 minute TV documentary about Great White Sharks off YouTube, and huddled around the laptop to watch it! It was very unexpected and entertaining, and a great way to calm the kids down for bedtime (well, sort of!).

Oh and I ASLO used the device to check out the post Christmas and New Year sales haha!

The mobile broadband device says it can connect up to 5 wi-fi enabled devices simultaneously. We did in fact connect 4 (a Samsung Galaxy and iPhone), an ipad and a laptop… at the same time.

It worked just like it was supposed to, and I noticed that it would switch between 4G and 3G, depending on availability, even while we were Skyping, without dropping the link. This is while we were on a farm surrounded by trees and hills, 30kms from the nearest town, and at least 4km from the nearest major road where a mobile tower might be. Apparently, there is an antenna that you can plug in to improve reception, but we didn’t test that.

So while we won’t use mobile connectivity to check our work email and social media every single day on holiday, it’s been really great to have that capacity to stay connected to family, and to download stuff to enhance our holiday!

Click here to find out more information about Telstra 4G pre-paid broadband devices.

And check out how other Aussie Bloggers used their Telstra 4G device here, http://telstra4gwifi.com.au

I can’t believe that the whole Christmas/New Year season is over already!

Happy New Year everyone!… even though it is the 4th January already! Time has slipped away from me, due to the very busy, very fabulous, very exhausting holiday I just got back from.

We went to stay with friends on a little farm in Denmark (South West Region of Western Australia), and these are just some of the highlights.

A go-kart built in four hours out of an old pram, a chair, and other random things from the farm shed.

I have not been fishing since I discovered boy bands.

But this holiday, I caught not one, but TWO fish haha!

(However, they were so small that we threw them back into the water.)

From a pond on the farm, we caught and ate wild marron, a kind of freshwater crayfish that is considered a delicacy in Western Australia.

Although my husband insisted that it looked like a giant black cockroach crossed with a lobster, I was more than happy to cook it and eat it with a tiny squeeze of lemon.

Our host explained that marron survive regular Western Australian summer droughts by just walking over dry land to another water hole when they need to! I felt honored to be eating an animal with such excellent survival skills.

We visited a local winery called Moombaki and bought one of the last bottles of wine from an award winning, 2004 vintage. It was exquisitely smooth, and was so freaking amazing – can you tell I am not a wine expert? Perhaps knowing that it was one of the last bottles made it even nicer.

And now I know where the phrase ‘like a kid in a lolly shop” comes from. We wandered into this tiny, amazing shop called Ooh La Lollipop in a very pretty little town called Bridgetown.

It’s PACKED with every kind of candy you could imagine, and Liam was delirious with excitement.

But alas, every holiday comes to an end. Although, to tell the truth, I am glad to get back home to a more regular routine… and a brand new year.

I’m sitting with a laptop on my lap, in a rusty tractor, parked in an old metal shed, on top of a hill, in the middle of a paddock, on a farm, in the South West region of Western Australia.

Why? Well, I’m on a holiday trip with my family, and I am using this opportunity to literally road test a Telstra 4G high speed mobile broadband device, that can provide wireless connections for multiple devices at once. I have agreed to review it for Telstra, and this holiday, where we are in multiple remote-ish locations over the course of a week, is the perfect opportunity.

I hear the sweet, rich sounds of the bush. The birds singing, the crickets chirping, the trees and wind echoing through the valley… it’s simply beautiful and breathtaking.

And we are 30 kms from nearest town – which is why I am in the tractor shed… it is on top of the hill, so it gets the signal over that distance, and over the ZILLIONS of trees around here.

Wish you were here!

xxx