bugs travel

A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holidays.

The real villain on MAFS

I know it’s more than a week since the nation’s favourite train wreck of a television show had its fiery finale, but there’s one part of Married At First Sight I still can’t get over. It also seems to have slipped curiously under the radar. The three-day honeymoon. That’s right, forget Fraser’s waistcoast, Ksenia’s weird insistence on a husband who eats barracuda and the fact that Julia’s ego just couldn’t handle Dave being the one to reject her. No, the real villain on season two of the show was the length of the honeymoon.

Now it’s one thing if couples can’t afford a honeymoon or decide on something short ‘n’ sweet in their home country, but to fly all the way from New Zealand to Bali (via the Gold Coast too, given Air Asia was the sponsoring airline) for three days? Oh, the humanity!

As if the trauma of meeting your spouse for the first time at the altar wasn’t enough, the couples were then subjected to a wedding night of 3-star romantic delights at Rydges Hotel (handily positioned across from the Auckland District Court) before jetting off to Bali. Roughly 10 hours in the air later, the bleary-eyed strangers/ newlyweds hit the steamy tarmac of Denpasar, only to be NZ-bound again a mere three nights later. I wouldn’t have recovered from the jetlag, let alone the shock of learning my spouse was, for example, a kind-of-a-bigdeal social media influencer!

With that as the bumpy, blurry beginning of the marriage, it’s little surprise most of the couples broke up before last weekend’s finale. No matter how expert the “experts” who matched them were, there aren’t many of us who’d come out of a three-day honeymoon 10 hours away in a better romantic state than when we left. Even in a place as awesome as Bali.

Bagging sleeping bag bags

“So what’s the deal with sleeping bag bags?” said Jerry Seinfeld. Or if he didn’t, I wish he had because

I’m searching for the comedy I know lies somewhere in the annual summer camping fiasco of packing up a tent. I hate it. I’m useless at most aspects of camping, in part because I get hung up on things like why sleeping bag bags are not my friend. Would it destroy camping if sleeping bag bags were just a fraction bigger?

It seems every storage device for camping is just a bit too small. Have a bag or box for your inflatable mattress? You can be guaranteed no amount of squeezing and squishing will prevent that box from ripping come pack-up time. And as for those sleeping bag bags, every camping trip it’s the same palaver of a whole-body writhe to get it back in.

You wouldn’t read about it!