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Published: November 25th 2013
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Rose street market
Graffiti covered Fitzroy, but in the best possible taste! So another cloudy start. During the previous afternoon we had decided to do our own wine tour. This would involve travelling to different parts of the city, drinking wine!
We decided that we should start with a proper breakfast so headed to the place we had been the day before. Unfortunately it was closed - problem on a Saturday when you are stating in the business district so we headed to the food court. The benefit of the food court is free wifi so I sensibly checked out the myki fares situation. On a Saturday it's only $3.50 all day so it was going to be ideal for a tour. Trouble was we had no idea how much was on the card and not all tram stops have payment machines. So we headed to the main station, hey presto we had enough to get us through the day! And the sun came out!
First stop was the Fitzroy district. We were heading to the Rose street market, which is an artist market. Through joint effort we found it pretty painlessly. I was hoping to find some interesting gifts for back home but although the stuff was nice, there was
Wine Flight 1
Bubbles for me and beer for ian. In the little creatures pub. nothing that was sufficiently 'Australian' to make a suitable present. -we then went for a wander down Brunswick street, the main road through Fitzroy. It's a really nice place to visit. Lots of vintage clothes shops, interesting homeware stuff and lots and lots of cafés and restaurants. Had a real feel of Camden with its market but maybe more family type atmosphere. Obviously a popular place to live.
We decided it was time to stop for our first tasting and popped into a bar called 'Little Creatures', mainly as it was the first place we had seen anyone drinking alcohol as opposed to coffee. It was a massive warehouse when we got inside and appeared to sell its own beers (beers were definitely it's speciality). Having tasted a few suggested by the waitress Ian finally selected one but I stuck to the original plan and ordered a glass of bubbles (all wine tours seemed to start with bubbles) .
As we sat there, people started to order food and boy did it look good. But we felt we had agreed to drink in different places so we left to look for our next stop. Trouble is 15 mins
'Wine' flight 2
Beers for both this time. later we decided that we really wanted to eat back there, so we broke another of our wine tour rules and visited the same place twice!
Lunch ordered with beers for both of us (not doing well with the wine bit of this tour). I had a bright ale and Ian tried their IPA. Food was as good as it looked and they also threw in the biggest complementary bucket of chips I have every seen.
So now fully sated we decided it was time to head off to another part of Melbourne. We decided to head down to Harbour town, home of the infamous wheel and according to the guides 'a shopping and eating experience'. Well not an experience I would ever repeat. Our guide on the GOR trip had said that it had been built around the eye and as that has never opened it probably means no one bothers going there, it's absolutely full of dodgy outlet type places and bargain basement shops with a few chained restaurants thrown in. It's like a run down gunwharf quays. So instead of looking for bar 3 we just jumped back on the tram and headed back into
Free food!
This must be the biggest free bowl of chips in the world. Scrummy! (As was the pulled pork slider at the back) the the main shopping part of the city.
So stop 3 was a typical Australian sports bar, on Elizabeth street, which had lots of screens showing the cricket. Obviously we whispered as we ordered our wines (semillion sauvignon blanc) and sat in silence in a quiet corner to avoid any Aussies in the bar catching our accents and starting to brag!
We escaped unscathed and decided to start a walk back to the hotel as the weather had started to close in again. They say melbournes the city where you can get all four seasons In one day and I really think we did! We just got back as the heavens opened!!!!
So the plan that night was to head out to st Kildas for an Italian, but in the end we decided to stick to something closer to home and visited one right next door to the hotel called Tutte Benne. Before dinner we did our final wine stop, a glass of Shiraz.
Dinner was nice, probably not as good as it would have been if we had made the trip to the beach. However considering how wet we got just walking back to our
Wine flight 3
Sem Sauvignon blanc in the pub watching the cricket hotel from next door I think we made the right decision. Especially on top of my wine tour and a bottle of Merlot with dinner!
I fell into bed. Ian decided to do a bit of channel hopping as he joined me and found the rugby league World Cup Semi final between NZ and England starting (around midnight). Apparently it was a very exciting game which England lost in the last 20 seconds of the match. I only got the odd highlight when the excitement overcame him and I was jolted awake with large cheers!
Packing and NZ in the morning. Hard to believe we are at the end of our Australia leg. The last four weeks have flown by, and it feels like it's speeding up. Maybe a change of country will slow it down again.
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