Our weekend

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This was probably about the most chilled out weekend we'd had in a while.

I hired a car again for the weekend - this time I went to a "local" car hire place rather than Hertz or whatever - it was $20 a day or something for this massive "wagon" as the guy called it.

Anyway - it was filthy, it smelled disgusting, the wipers didn't work, the breaks were as soft as anything, it had enough petrol in it to get me to the garage (just) and it didn't have any road tax! Other than that, it was fine! I soon decided that there would be no drives in the country this weekend!

We did the token trip to Ikea on the Friday night (via another shopping centre about 40kms out of town which, to all intents and purposes, was shut by the time we got to it!). Claire did, however, have a great find in k-mart - a washing machine for $299 - which we got there and then - it works a treat and saved us hiring one (which would have cost that in about 6 months). We also bought loads of kitchen stuff - it really was a great Friday night out!

Saturday morning I went back to Moorabbin airport and joined the Royal Victorian Aero Club. I did my first flight with them (I need to do a flight test and want to do a few hours with an instructor to get familiar with the local procedures first). We didn't go very far - but it was great to be back in the air. Things are quite different, so it will take a wee bit of getting used to (like trying to work out what runway is in use as they have 12 of them!!). It is a very busy wee airport - when I taxied out to take off there were at least 5 other planes waiting to go before me - and as many landed at the same time.

The guy I was flying is was a policeman during the week and flies at the weekend for fun - so I got him to check out the hired car for me. Despite its obvious unroadworthy condition, he said "ach, you know, it should have tax but no-one is going to bother about it". Could you imagine the police back home if they got hold of a car like that!

Claire came out to the airport, but took a drive to the shops where she bumped into Michelle & Elaine (they work in the Subway just beside the airport) and Eddie and Bernadette.

We spent the afternoon looking at suites and three times thought we had found one and three times would have bought it there and then had we not had to go back to the place we were at last weekend to have a token look around and then tell them we couldn't find anything suitable so could we please have our money back! I was actually pleased that that suite hadn't fitted by this point as we were seeing much nicer ones for not much more money. And each time we found one, we found a nicer one in the next shop!

Anyway - we did go back and, grudgingly, the bloke gave us our money back (after moaning a bit).

We'd not had the best afternoon (trailing about furniture shops again) so decided to have a wee night out on Church Street. Everyone goes on about the nightlife on Church Street and, to be honest, I didn't really dig it. In fact, the best place we found was the cocktail bar in TGI Fridays, which was very similar to the one on Buchanan Street! We ended up in an Irish bar - which was Irish in the sense that it had a clover or something on the bar and sold Guinness on draft - I couldn't see much else Irish about it (it didn’t even sell pints!).

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