A Day of Rest

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After a late night on New Years Eve and not getting to bed until after one, we had nothing planned for the morning. Very unlike us, we slept in until about 8, but didn't get out of bed until almost 9. We decided to try to breakfast the hotel had to offered, but in our opinion it was nothing special and probably not worth the $17 we spent on it. So we will stick to the food we bought.

At 12 we went to see the movie Sing at Melbourne Central Hoyts. It was surprisingly good and we had a few laughs at it. It was definitely better than what we thought it would be and left feeling quite pleased.

We grabbed some lunch from the food court and then headed back to our hotel where we relaxed for a few hours before heading to the MCG for a Big Bash game between the two Melbourne teams - Renegades vs. Stars. Being New Years Day they were expecting a big crowd, and a big crowd there was. Towards the end of the match they made an announcement that the attendance was about 72k. So a good effort.

We were going to kill some time by walking to the stadium, but when we got outside, it was raining so jumped into a taxi. We arrived about 2 hours before the event, so ate an early dinner at the stadium. What we didn't know was going to be there was Australian singer, Guy Sebastian. We were sitting on the complete opposite side to where he was performing, so was unable to get any good photos, but he was entertaining. Whenever the Stars took a wicket or scored well, they would set off fireworks around the stadium, as well as at the end. They were very pretty to watch, especially the ones after the game. Though, they did set them off sporadically, so it always made us jump when they went off!

The match itself was exciting, and as it was the Stars home game, the majority of the crowd were supporting them, but in the end the Renegades won. It was very exciting, and the Stars target score had to be adjusted due to a little bit of rain, meaning they had to stop play for a while.

Sitting right behind us (undercover thank goodness) were some guys. One of them was American, and Ashleigh found it very interesting as they tried to explain the game of cricket to him. He actually picked it up very quickly, and in the end was making comments regarding the game and talking about specific elements such as run rate, or whether the players should make 2 runs or one run.

It came down to the last few balls, which made for another exciting finish!

We had to walk a bit of a distance to manage to find a taxi back to our hotel, but we ended up finding a nice driver (a sensible one this time) who was interested in the cricket and chatted to us about the game, and about the silly road designs in Melbourne. As we got out, he wished us a safe trip back to Canberra.

Tomorrow is our only early start. We have a tour booked and have to be at our pickup location by 7:15am (with a 20 minute walk to there).

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