After that rainy day when I was stepping in puddles to my ankles, sloshing through sidewalks never having a chance to dry off, my shoes were put through the wringer. Or they should have been, in a literal sense.
The next day I wore my flip flops out because my shoes didn't dry overnight. Imagine my delight when I opened the door to my hotel room that evening and was greeted by a smell so overwhelmingly bad I slammed the door shut again to collect myself.
There is a dead animal in my room!
No, it was the stench of a dying, rotting New Balance shoe. Fine. I can solve this with Tide. I dumped some packs of detergent in the hotel sink and washed those kicks and let them soak in suds for awhile. I wrung them out and left them to dry.
Problem solved. I wore them to the mountains. That was fine until I got on the bus and the driver turned the air conditioning on - and it was blowing out of floor vents. The smell of my shoes was now being shot into the air in a small public space. I attempted to bury my own feet under a few bags and wished that my sense of smell was overly sensitive.
That's not the case at all but helped momentarily.
Those shoes did not make it to Melbourne. I double bagged them and threw them in the garbage in Sydney. If I put those in my luggage I would have had to light all my belongings on fire upon arrival.
I was thrilled to find a New Balance outlet in Melbourne at the DFO (direct factory outlets, not a branch of our fish federal department) and got a pair of new kicks for $60 all in. Steal! They aren't my favourite colour but they don't smell.
