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Published: April 2nd 2011
Our future?
Getting in our parenting practiceMelbourne
We left Bangkok in the early evening and flew with Malaysian Airlines to Kuala Lumpur where we had arranged to spend the night in a hotel near the airport. We had decided to break the trip up mostly because we needed to get into Melbourne in the evening when our friends would be home from work to pick us up from the airport. It turned out to be good decision as we got into our hotel at about 12 midnight and got a solid five and a half hours sleep before we had to get up and check in again. We also had the next seven hours on a plane in daylight hours to catch up on lots of movies we had missed while travelling.
We arrived about 7.30pm to a relatively freezing cold Melbourne (we had gone from 34 degrees in Bangkok to a rather cool 12 degrees celcius in Melbourne!) and were met with our friend from London, Grant. We had a lovely room at Grant & Lyndal's for the week on the world's most comfy sofabed and spent a lot of our time playing with their one-year-old daughter Morgan.
After such a long time
Nice day out
Brent, Mardi and Abi travelling, Australia was really a time to catch up with friends and relax a bit. Brent lived in Australia, in the Gold Coast, for a year when he was younger and had already been to Australia a few times. On the otherhand, Cath had only been to Australia once and that was to the extremely touristy Surfers Paradise. As Cath had never been to Melbourne or Sydney, so she was keen to do a little bit of sightseeing as well. First things, first though, Cath went and got herself her first haircut for nearly six months (!!) and we went shopping for some warm clothes! .We had made the decision to send a lot of our gear home once we reached Bangkok so we didn't have to carry it around. This included our sleeping bags and most of our warm clothes - this made way for us to get some more summer gear for the two months we spent in South East Asia. We had originally planned on visiting China before heading to Australia when it was warmer, but after finding out how difficult it is to get a Chinese visa whilst on the road, coupled with the 4 September
earthquake in Cath's hometown of Christchurch we were keen to see some friendly faces.
Our shopping completed and plenty of time spent playing with Morgan, we went into town to meet our friend Mardi and her two-year-old daughter Abi. Mardi had taken Abi to the children's park at the Botanical Gardens so we met up with them there and had a little picnic. Melbourne had turned on some of its famous "four seasons on one day weather". It started off nice and sunny, then turned to train, then cleared up and came out sunny again.
The next day we headed back on the train into the centre of the city for some outlet store shopping before meeting up with Grant for dinner. We then went on to a pub called Little Creatures and met up with some of Brent's old friends from his days in London. We had a lovely night catching up on old and new times with a few beers and glasses of wine thrown in.
It was only on our last day in Melbourne that we decided we should probably get some sightseeing in! Better late than never, we headed back into the city
Federation Square
"Melbourne's meeting place" to see Federation Square, then we went up the Eureka Tower to get a panoramic view of Melbourne. From there we hopped on a tourist tram and did a loop around the central city area before heading home to pack for our train journey to Sydney.
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