Blogs from Victoria, Australia, Oceania - page 18

Although part of my travel blog, this isn’t quite a travel blog blog. It’s closer to just my experience meeting up with various people in a place, that happened to be Melbourne. I didn’t really experience much of the city, but that was more/less the point of this trip. If you’re hoping to get some advice to insights into Melbourne travels, I probably wouldn’t go any further. This is more about a young male popping over to catch up with friends and family, and his social interactions. My decision to visit Melbourne was mostly for a joke that was only really funny to me. A small group of friends have an ongoing messaging group, where we catch up on life, but mostly talk shit. About half the group live in Australia, and I occasionally fake-join into ... read more

We set off on our next great adventure - a lap of the globe. Issy is forever coming up with new ways of making our suitcases stand out while they whiz around the airport carousels with everyone else’s very similar looking baggage. She bought some floral covers for one of our trips but they all got torn. Next were purple lanyards, but they had locks on them and we lost the keys. So for this trip she did what any talented, self respecting artist would do, and painted them, with flowers. Very pretty too. I wonder why no one else has thought to do that. Maybe she’ll start a trend. We are surrounded on our overnight flight to Dubai by members of the Haileybury College Pipes and Drums Band, who are off to Scotland to compete. ... read more

It is not long now until we are home. With a lunchtime booking on Thursday at one of our favourites … the restaurant at the Trentham Estate Winery, Trentham Cliffs, and the forecast for ugly, windy weather, we opted to keep moving in short steps rather than long days in poor conditions. So, one-night stops at Deniliquin, Swanhill, Trentham Cliffs and Renmark before our final destination, the Barossa. This has been a particularly chilly leg of our journey. Trying to head out of Rutherglen over the bridge at Colac we were shattered to find the bridge was closed due to repairs. No detour directions as to the nearest river crossing, so a quick consult with Camps Australia Wide and Google we headed to Deniliquin. Deniliquin Our arrival in Deniliquin was heralded by a phenomenal greeting of ... read more

Lakes Entrance is hardly a tough place to do double time. It’s beautiful, there is plenty to do and see and the weather perfect. The fridge saga continued with the flashing and clicking when we plugged it into power. No matter what we did we could not get it to calm. Being less than halfway through our trip we decided to seek help. After a few phone calls Greg located Wizard Appliances in Bairnsdale back 35km the way we had just come. It was late in the day so we arranged to take the van there first thing in the morning. In the meantime, we had to work out what to do with our freezer full of meat and fridge full of supplies. The car fridge was turned into a freezer which we could run on ... read more

As we travel, we ask the locals or other travellers about the “must see”places. Mallacoota has received high praise and having seen it featured on the ABC Back Roads travel program we felt this is a place not to be missed. And we were not disappointed. Our day started early, getting to Wizard Appliances in Bairnsdale by 8.30am for our fridge repairs. Brad was ready and rearing so we were in and out within an hour. All seems to be working ok now. Brad was off to a funeral in Salisbury, SA this weekend. He had no idea where he was heading. Greg was careful not to tell him it was not the best end of town. We took the Alpine Highway which was more direct to Mallacoota than going back to Lakes Entrance. As the ... read more