When you become a parent so much of your world changes, naturally. It’s different for each person but the common things are usually how much time you have, sleep (boy do I miss sleep!), your mindset and approach to life, how you see the future and I could go on! For us we knew travel would be impacted, we just assumed we’d stop travelling all together! Thankfully that has not been the case at all, if anything we “travel” more frequently just we tend to stay much closer to home now 🙂
One of our favourite things to do as a family is do local stays. You still experience the benefits of being away from home, not having to cook or clean, staying at a nice hotel but having a much shorter travel time so that the kids don’t become over stimulated.
So some of the travel content you’ll find on my channel and blog over the coming years will be local stays across Melbourne! Our most recent stay was at the Parkroyal Monash Hotel located above the M City Shopping Centre. One of the reasons was because we had not so recently stayed at the Parkroyal Melbourne Airport hotel before our trip to Japan (our flight was early in the morning so this cut down on early morning wake up and drive to the airport) and this hotel was located so close to Monash University, the very place Toby and I met almost 22 years ago now 🙂
We decided a single night was all we needed as the hotel wasn’t really located near any interesting attractions so the stay would be purely to explore and enjoy the hotel. In retrospect so glad we only stayed a night because this hotel felt very much like a business hotel, there wasn’t a whole lot to do as a guest. Even the swimming pool (which we use extensively now as our kids love the water) was cold, outside and shared with a bunch of residential apartments. Fortunately there was the M City shopping centre but even then when compared to places we are used to like Chadstone it was extremely small.
All in all it was a nice short and informative staycation though I can’t see ourselves returning. If you want to know more feel free to checkout the video down below!
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