Howdy all! Well, in a blink of an eye half a year is gone! 2022 Part One done and dusted just like that! Who woulda thunk it, right? What will the second half of the year have in store??? Well, I think I will do a post on THAT next week! But today I wanted to look back on my vlogging this year this far and in particular recap the Melboure Revealed episodes I have shot.

Last year I made 27 episodes of Melbourne Revealed – that means an episode on average for every two weeks! That was made a bit necessary by the lack of movement from state to state (and indeed country to country) that was allowed here in Australia. We experience several short lockdowns in the first half of the year, then another 3-4 month lockdown in the second half. Air travel was basically impossible, no other states would let us in and plans for travel kept falling by the wayside.

At the end of the year we started to open up again and I managed to get to Adelaide, and then this year Mt Baw, a road trip to Merimbula (first vlog from that one is coming up this Thursday on the You of Tube, Friday here on the blog) and a trip to the Gold Coast in April. Those are vlogs I haven’t even started to edit but will be getting into in the next few weeks.

So I didn’t need to shoot as many episodes of Melbourne Revealed because I had plenty of material. That’s a good thing because if I kept doing 27 a year I would soon enough be showcasing parts of Melbourne which could be classified as seriously uninteresting, like ‘Check out my local Pharmacy’! Actually to be fair I think there’s still plenty to show in Melbourne.

Eventually though I got to it, because I looked at my plan for releasing videos and decided that I would do six or seven ‘Melbourne Revealeds’ in the first half of the year. What I had really wanted to do was go to the Casino, it was how I planned to finish last year off, I had some friends who wanted to get dressed up and make a big night of it, but we just couldn’t agree on WHICH night and it kept being put off. I thought it might be a good start to this stretch of episodes, but I hit the same problems, and eventually I realised it wasn’t going to happen.

So I decided the Eureka Tower would be the best place to get the ball rolling, although actually I knew I wanted to shoot at Werribee Mansion too so I started there with Mr Adrian Valenta in tow. Before heading over to what is the other side of the city for ME, I looked at Werribee to see if there was anything else that could help me get two vlogs out of the day, and I found the K-Road cliffs. It ended up being a pretty long but satisfying day! The drive wasn’t great as there are some road works going on pretty much everywhere in this city, but the weather was fine and warm, and the cliffs and mansion were beautiful.

So I brilliantly arranged to meet Adrian in the city a few weeks later to do the Eureka Tower episode. Many laughs on this, I had NO IDEA it wasn’t opened on Mondays! It must be a post-covid thing because I’m sure back in the day it was open seven days a week. Anyways, did the intro, walked up to the tower, to find it closed! It’s brilliantly edited though because we came back weeks later on a Thursday and still used the original introduction. There was a LOT unused this year, especially on that video we went to a pub and phaffed around with lunch there, but it just would have been irrelevant and made the video too long.

On the day we first attempted to film this vlog we actually went to ACMI in the end after finding the Eureka Tower closed. This one actually I think is one of the best, if not the best of this group of seven. At least in the humour stakes! There is more banter than ever before in this vlog and SO MUCH was cut too. Like when Adrian and I stood for five minutes outside the City Hatters.

Needing to fill gaps on my schedule one Thursday when I was hoping to go to the Casino and the plans fell apart again, I ended up at the Aquarium by myself shocked at the price – so in some ways it’s a good thing that one was by myself! Great aquarium though!

THEN I did get to the Casino, day time with Adrian. I’ve already written about how disappointing that was in the end.

The final one I shot was on Chapel Street with Jock, and very fine gentleman indeed. That was only shot a couple of weeks before it went up, but that was a pretty good one too and ended up being the longest vlog of the seven. I think it well could have been much longer if I had wanted, but I have learnt to be a brutal when editing because I am aware that I certainly don’t want to sit through a forty minute vlog on pretty much anything, and I doubt whether anyone wants to see ME vlog for such a period of time either!

All in all, this year’s vlogs so far have certainly seen the banter taken to the next level, and I think I am improving over all. A couple of months ago now I passed 400 subscribers which was great, and in May I saw a boost in subs over a couple of weeks, only to see it totally balanced out in June with barely ANY new subscribers following my channel which was a bit disheartening if I am to be honest.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube Channel, I would LOVE you to! Every Thursday 12am Australian Eastern Time a new vlog drops. This week’s features the incredible Buchan Caves! Anyways, thanks for popping by and checking out my rambling today! May the Journey Never End!