Marulan Stayz: Marulan, AUSTRALIA

Phew... lots and lots of driving between Sydney and Canberra starts to take its toll. A few times in a week, with late finishes and early starts.... well, the drive is easy on a decent motorway, but in some was that is even worse... as the tiredness starts to set in, and you start to zone out. Plus, there is the roadkill and live kangaroos and wombats to dodge... and those bloody kangaroos can be really unpredictable.... just suddenly changing directing within a single bound.

So, the last few times... I did half the journey after a late rehearsal/concert... and completed the rest in the morning to make a morning rehearsal in the other city. And I stayed at a sort of halfway guesthouse called Marulan Stayz, which was essentially a large house with lots of seperate private rooms but with shared bathroom facilities.

You enter into a fairly functional sort of place... and most of the visitors seem to be tradies or doctors doing something similar to me... traveling between work... although, I have a feeling that I was the only musician doing that!

It is a medium sized sort of room... I didn't really need anything that grand, I was only just going to stay about 8 hours overnight, and the bed was comfy enough for that purpose... but also keeping in mind that I was pretty exhausted and so I think I would have easily fallen asleep on the couch, or the floor, or the steering wheel....

A small TV rounded out the amenities... but again, I'm not really sure that many people use this place for extended stays. In fact, when I was leaving at around 8 in the morning, I would see that there were no other cars in the carpark... when there was at least few in there the evening beforehand. So, that meant that I was often the last into the overnight stay and one the of the last out...

... and that parking area was quite important... as there were quite a lot of larger cars, utes and SUVs that were using the space. One thing that was a bit difficult was the driveway into the parking area that came in from the road. It was quite steep... and that wouldn't be that much of a problem for the high mounted utes and SUVs... but for my little cars, a sedan and a hatchbank... well, it would need a tight turn at the bottom of the ramp to avoid scraping the bumpers!

But apart from that... I did enjoy my overnight crashes at Stayz... a decent halfway house to avoid getting exhausted on late night and early morning starts between Sydney and Canberra... nothing fancy, but, you don't really anything fancy for an overnight crash pad!