The Big Trip

(or CD collecting part 2)

For the first time in a while, I have been honest with what I'm going to do next.

In my last post, second hand music collecting, I wrote about collecting music CDs second hand and at the end I mentioned that I planned to go on a big trip where I go to all the op shops around my state of Tasmania.

Well, I actually did do what I said: I did some day travelling. I took a week of annual leave and spent 3 days driving across the state. But, I will admit I deviated from my original plan in the end.

Day 1: Snug

For the first day of my tripping, I chose to go from Hobart to snug. It's about 40 minutes and on the way I would pass Kingston and Margate, 2 reasonably big towns. I set out at about 9am, since it wasn't really going to be a long trip. I intended to check out some op shops in Kingston first, but a wrong turn on the highway pretty much guided me straight to Margate anyway so I figured I'd start at snug at work my way back.

My first stop was a second chance/tip shop in Electrona. Unfortunately, they didn't have any CDs worth listening too. They had a surprising assortment of kid things and furniture but that definitely was not what I was there for. I saw a big keyboard. I thought about it, but I didn't want to get distracted.

Because I had been looking around the shop for around half an hour though, I decided I needed to find something to actually buy. In the end, I got a Halloween origami book (for kids) and a copy of Doom 2 on CD. After that I set off for Snug.

Funny enough, there wasn't anything much in Snug. If you don't know, Snug is pretty close to a tourist-y hot spot. Around there you will mostly see wine vineyards and most of the signs along the road are trying to direct you towards the ferry that goes to Bruny Island. After I had pretty much passed snug completely and all there was to see was rural post office/petrol stations/town centre stores, I decided I was just going back to Margate. I knew well that there were 2 op shops there, including a very good one.

Firstly, I think I went to a relatively new City Mission Op Shop. I quickly found out they had not much there. Unlike me, I didn't buy anything in that store. I looked at the DVDs and books, but there was nothing that stood out to me. After going to so many op shops feeling like I had to buy something, I figured I had enough junk. However, the second op shop, the Ten Lives Op Shop had some pretty good stuff. They had a minuscule amount of CDs but HEAPS of DVDs. So much you couldn't ignore. And I wasn't like it was mostly old person stuff too, which it usually turns out to be at these stores. They had new movies, they had independent movies, classic movies, comedies and things. It was almost like a video rental place with the selection they had.

Not only that, but I managed to find an assortment of Educational games we used to have on the computers at our primary school from Ed Alive. If you are unfamiliar, these are Australian made educational software for maths and spelling. Sometimes, when we finished our work early, we would be able to play on the computers, but we were only allowed to play these sorts of games. They had multiplayer modes that allowed us to take turns on the keyboard and, despite being educational, they were pretty fun. Simply the memories that queued up as I looked at the screenshots on the back were enough for me to pay 2 dollars just to have them sit on the shelf. I managed to find 4 of these Ed Alive games. I really wanted the one that used to be me and my friends' favourites, Words Rock, but no matter how hard I looked I couldn't find it. On top of that I snagged a couple of DVDs including the new Robert Patterson Batman movie, The Darjeeling Limited and a Jeremy Clarkson DVD on supercars.

Even though I didn't get any CDs, I saw this as a pretty good haul for an op shop. All the Ten Lives op shops are usually like that. They always have some good stuff that I don't really go in looking for yet enjoy purchasing.

After an obligatory stop at the Margate train for a snack pack and some imported candy (the record store there was closed on the Tuesday) I went back to Kingston to find the shopping centre.

I wasn't really familiar with Kingston commercial district, so I went to the first place the roads took me. That happened to be the underground parking for the Channel Court shopping centre. I hadn't been here before despite this being only about a 30-minute drive.

The layout of this shopping centre was a bit confusing, and it was slowly getting to 3pm, so I chose to avoid the other op shops around the town. There was one place that sold records and CDs. Melrock Music.

Funny enough, I think Melrock Music was the first music store that actually provided what I expected from a music store. When I go to music stores around Hobart, what I'm practically going to are record stores. JB Hi-Fi sells new and popular music CDs at full price. Music Without Frontiers sells LPs and some local rock CDs. If you wanted anything in between, you would have to go online and get it shipped from either the mainland.

At long last, on the first day of my big trip, I had finally found the sort of CD store I was looking for. Unlike all the other music stores and Jbs, this store's primary focus was on providing the biggest range of CDs. They had shelves full of CDs and just a few LPs around the entrance. They had sections for second hand CDs, sections for genres, a section for decades and an area for groups. Honestly, the groups sections didn't really make sense, but I guess if you have a lot of stock then maybe that was just easier. They had some smaller sections for singles, Japanese imports, a shelf devoted to Metal and metal sub-genres, and a place for overstocked CDs which they sold for a bit cheaper.

Another thing, they were amazing prices for a store. With the independent CD sellers on eBay, it makes sense that they sell things for around 15 dollars each, but you can chalk that up to be because these were pawned second hand CDs. This place was selling even the special editions of CDs for around 15 dollars each. I was getting some overstocks for 10 or 7 dollars. That was amazing value seeing that stores like Music Without Frontiers was selling what I would call some pretty run-of-the-mill albums for 20 or 25 dollars each.

I thought to myself as I went through all the bands in the group section; “Its impressive, but I wonder if they have some of the more niche electronic bands”. So I then went over to the electronic section of the store, looking for some Death in Vegas. I only had Satan's Circus and was looking to see if I could get some more. They did have Death in Vegas, but that was the one album I already had. However, they were selling it for a couple dollars cheaper than what they were selling it for on eBay, and it looked like it was in better condition. 15 Australian dollars for that 2 disc album was definitely a good price for what it was.

I purchased 70 dollars worth of CDs. That included a special edition of Florence + The Machine, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, a special edition of Eskimo Joe, Inshalla, Garbage, James Blunt's Back to Bedlam, Black Fingernails Red Wine and Fatboy Slim, You've Come A Long Way, Baby.

Day 2: Port Arthur

Day 2 was a bit of a stupid idea. Port Arthur was another tourist town in Tasmania, but it wasn't really the place you go to do some shopping. I never actually made it to Port Arthur, so I couldn't really tell you if there were actually any op shops, tip shops or music stores down that way.

However, along the way is Sorell. There was a couple op shops there. They had a very big Salvos or Vinnies there but, unfortunately, there wasn't any CDs there taking home. I had a look around the whole shop and I still couldn't find anything around. At this point, after finding a very good music store in Kingston, I wasn't really feeling it. So I went home.

Day 3: Launceston

This was probably a very dumb idea. The second-biggest city apart from Hobart was Launceston, which was about a 3-hour drive from Hobart. I decided, to save myself money and a day, I was just going to drive up to Launceston then drive back within the same day. I got up early, drove non-stop to Launceston, then went and paid for an hour of parking.

If you haven't been to Launceston, it has all the same problems Hobart has. It's an old city, filled with new and old buildings within its centre, and by the time you find out which lane turns where, you are already too late to turn in to the one you want. Luckily, I had been there just over a year ago and knew the centre car park was where I wanted to be.

After driving for 3 hours straight so early in the morning, I was a bit exhausted. An hour wasn't really enough time for me to chill out. I made the choice to have lunch first, but it was bang on 1pm, which meant it was really busy. Eating my sandwich and drinking my bottle of sparkling water at Banjo's wasn't very calming at all.

I went to the music (as in music making instrument) store around the corner. I saw online that they were closing soon, so I went in to see if I could get a new compact midi keyboard for super cheap. They neither had a small midi keyboard nor clearance prices, so I didn't stay long. I got to the music store (as in the media) I was after with a good 45 minutes to spare at that point.

This was another decent record store, but there wasn't a lot of niche CDs. I saw one guy out the corner of my eye lift up the Bleach anime OST on LP so no doubt there was going to be a lot of good LPs in there. The selection of CDs they had were of mostly knowable bands. They had an alright selection of metal CDs but apart from that it was just semi-popular rock bands that people would know. However, they did have a small section with a couple CDs from local bands from Tasmania, my home state.

I picked one up from Avarice In Audio and another from a band called The Namesakes. It was nice to know that there were some physical discs being sold from local bands, so I thought I'd take a risk on these two. I also picked up some Karnivol and some Talking Heads.

I walked around the city centre a bit more to see if there just happened to be any other places that might sell CDs for cheap but didn't see any. Then I went back to my car and left the car park with 10 minutes to spare. Energy was still a bit low and a sweet wouldn't have been bad to boost my energy and get me feeling good again, but it made more sense to use that as a reminder to stop at another town along the way back rather than just stopping for fuel once then locking in for another 3 hours.

I stopped for fuel at Campbell Town and then stopped again at the Ross bakery for a cronut (croissant donut thing I guess). The donut was nice and that was the end of it.

It's been a couple of months since then because I got lazy with the writing. But I wanted to keep this as a sort of documentation to my interests. I could already write another update for this but leaving it for a bit longer yet will yield more.

Thank you again for anyone out there that reads this. I don't know if I've put it in past writings, but I think I have worked out that all those views I seem to be getting on Neocities is has something to do with some automated systems loading the page. Probably has something to do with the website having the same name as something used to trip up web scrapers.