Blogs from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Oceania - page 2

NOTE:We arrived home on Wednesday the 5th of July. Just catching up on the final blog post! Oh dear, the walls in our Gundagai motel were paper thin! Before we turned the light out we could hear snoring from the room on the right hand side of our room. That seemed to settle down after we put our books aside to go to sleep, but then we were woken by bouts of coughing from the room on the other side of us during the night. We haven’t done badly though as last night is the first time we have been aware of noises from adjacent rooms. So many motels/short-stay apartments and all so different! Some big, some vast, some small. And the showers! Walk-in showers, regular showers with screens and some with the corner cut off ... read more

After we had watched the Adelaide Invitational Track and Field Meet, Fletcher received an invitation to attend the Maurie Plant meet in Melbourne which was a World Athletics Gold event. The last time we had gone to Melbourne was two years ago and that was for Maurie's funera,l so we thought, "Why not?"and accepted the invitation. We booked two nights' accommodation at the Amora Riverwalk Hotel which our nephew Tim Bilston manages and then decided to drive over, taking out'r time as we had not done the drive for nearly 30 years. We set out on Tuesday morning about 10am. Originally I was supposed to take a tour that morning so we had not planned to leave until much later, but a change in numbers for the tour allowed be to go earlier. I had booked ... read more

Had a chilled morning as there was no rush to get on the road this morning, set off soon after 10am for our trip in to Melbourne. The roads were pretty busy as we neared the city but we avoided most of the main town and tolls by taking the ‘scenic’ route in. Managed to park at the hotel and check in, although we couldn’t get the key straight away, so we decided to catch the tram in to town and have a look at the Old Gaol. It took us a while to fathom out how the tram worked but got our tickets, caught a tram just outside the hotel and got off a Central Station, the centre of Melbourne was heaving. The Old Gaol was just a 5 minute stroll away so we headed ... read more

Well all is ‘ancient history’ now. Back home, jobs sort of done and even almost ready for back to tutoring time. Not that the garden is back to some semblance of normality but it has at least been tackled. Lee has taken pity on me and not yet taken me to the nursery to get plants to replace those that did survive our absence. It will happen but I get a little reprieve. I have a bizarre collection of weeds in containers spread around the yard, of course it’s not green waste week. Strange how weeds grow like crazy yet ‘real’ plants wither and die under the same conditions! I’ve started walking Janus again but around a reduced course as he’s not quite accustomed to the 10 km yet. His holiday mum said he was out ... read more

We awake to that inevitable sad day when we have to start the tortuously long 25 hour trip home. There seem to be a lot of fancy looking black limousines waiting outside our Athens hotel. We can’t tell who’s inside them, if anyone, because they’ve all got blacked out windows. Issy says they’re picking up businessmen to take them off to one of the many nearby sex shops or strip clubs. It’s ten o’clock on a Monday morning, so I would have thought that most businessmen should now be off doing their “business”, although I suppose that word could have a couple of different meanings in that context. We’re flying back to Melbourne via Doha in Qatar. We seem to have struck it lucky at Athens Airport with our airline, Qatar; the check in queue is ... read more