Trip Advisor

Time to own up, as well as doing mum and wife stuff, I also have a serious relationship with a website called TripAdvisor.com. It was an instant attraction, I fell hard, I raved about it and was swept along in the heady heights of a new relationship. But then, as it can do, things took a turn for the worse. Reality hit that my "preference" for looking at reviews before I made any decisions about restaurants, movies, books, hotels...and really almost anything, was in fact...an obsession. I simply spent hours and hours and hours on tripadvisor trying to find a hotel for a weekend in Melbourne with my sister. I only shared this crisis with my clever friend Kate, who is clever enough to hear me out and support me without judgement. Although, when I'd told her that at the last moment, I'd cancelled a hotel in favour of another, she suggested that perhaps the original hotel may have been a little annoyed at me. I was only very slightly guilty for a second.

And as my sister and I lay on our twin queen beds looking out the floor to ceiling windows at the gorgeous Yarra River and Melbourne skyline, drinking cold NZ sav blanc and watching The Zen Master on MTV, I felt a little (ok a lot) smug that perhaps you have to go through the pain to enjoy the gain. Word of advice, approach Trip Advisor with caution if you have any symptons of an addictive personality.