When Nathan and I found out I was going to a training conference in Melbourne, we immediately planned to take full advantage of my free airfare and hotel accommodations. We decided to fly out after work on Friday night to give us maximum weekend. But of course we couldn't get on the same flights. Optimistically, we chose my flight leaving at 6:00 am. With increased security that meant being at the airport at 4:00 am. Nathan was supposed to get off work at midnight, but at 2:00 am I called the hospital and said I was coming to get him ready or not. After picking up Nathan, we rechecked our packing and decided to wait up for the cab scheduled to arrive at 3:30am. We shuttled off to the airport, took our seperate flights (Nathan's 1 hour later than mine) and arrived in Melbourne.

Because we would spend the whole week in the heart of the city, we decided to rent a car and go to the Yarra Valley, a wine region 1 hour from Melbourne. During our drive we stopped at a vineyard for lunch (I had tempura gator in honey eucalyptus sauce. Gator tastes good--but anything does when its deep fried). After lunch, we headed into Healesville for a leg stretching hike through a local rainforest. Yep. I said rainforest, in Australia. Its like Jurassic Park. Giant ferns, stringybark hanging down like vines, weird animal sounds, bugs.

That's when we heard something completely different. It was R2D2 after a severe electric shock. The bushes rattled, more strange noises. Then we saw the Lyrebird.
I am including a video for you to look at. This has got to be the strangest thing we have seen so far. Turn the sound up on your computer, you need the full effect.


If you want more of this weird bird, search www.youtube.com for lyrebird, the David attenborough video is awesome.

After seeing this amazing display, Nathan and I returned to our Bed and Breakfast for 12 hours sleep. We stayed among the vineyards, with a view of the mountains that reminded me of Nathan's grandpa's ranch in No. California. After more hikes through the rainforests and mountains, and trips for wine tasting, and cheese tasting (my favorite), we drove back to the airport to drop off the car, then went into the city.

Nathan's given you a picture of all that we did in Melbourne: Chinatown, Barber of Seville, 3 comedy shows, Miss Saigon, Immigration Museum, Melbourne museum, and food, food, food. We ate at Jamie Oliver's restaurant Fifteen (Jamie's menu, with a youth program that teaches disadvantaged youths to be top chefs.) and loads of other great places.

The city feels like Seattle, more overcast and rainy than Perth, with lots of little shops, alley ways, bars, restaurants, arts areas. The Central Business District is about 1 mile by a half mile, with a collection of ethnic and funky suburbs surrounding the CBD. Even though you can walk across the CBD in 30 minutes, Melbourne has a great public transport which combines several free “trams” (cable cars), commuter trams (pay for a ride), buses, subway, and trains.

There is a river which runs through the center of Melbourne. With the Royal Botanical Garden south of the river, and a sculpture garden running along the north of the river. An amusement park sits on one side of the river with a shows, ferris wheels, and other entertainments day or night. Across from the amusement park, sits rows and rows of boathouses, where the rowing crews take their boats on the river, day or night. We saw several crews rowing in after dark with the coxn holding a flashlight.

Melbourne has its famous market (Great Victoria Market) where Nathan bought a didgeridoo (living up to our tourist stereotype. Getting good will require lots of practice. Its like nothing else. Until Nathan’s mastered it, we’ll spare you the demonstration.) Nathan wandered St. Kilda’s (The uptown of Melbourne) while I sat through lecture after lecture. The last day, we had pizza on Lygon street, famous as a “Littly Italy”. We decided Papa Gino’s was authentic, because the couple next to us ordered in Italian, and our server chatted to them in Italian for a long time. Authentic or not, the pizza was excellent.

Finally back in Perth, and settling in to life as normal again. Well, normal for now, our rental agency has asked if we would consider terminating our rental contract early—because the owners are moving back to Perth. We have the right to stay til January because of our lease, so we can keep our great location near the beach, and the park, and our great native bush garden. But we can trade up if wewant. We’ll see if we can find anything better. Otherwise, it would take some pretty big incentives to persuade me to go through moving and resettling again.

We have tons more photos, I’ll just add a few more for your viewing enjoyment.

Melbourne...

...it's like a baby London. As far as cities go, this one is great! Kris is busy all day in her conference, so I'm roaming the streets looking for things to do when she gets off work, and let me tell you, there's plenty to choose from!
It may be a mix of the best of Seattle and London, with some history, some classical and gothic architecture, but with a trendy cafe and bar scene, good arts opportunities, and seemingly infinite variety of restaurants. And, like both of those cities, it is considered to be more overcast than the rest of the country.
We've been to the opera, the pub, a stand-up comedian (did I mention that this is the international comedy festival site?), and tonight will go to Miss Saigon. The only disappointment so far is that the Percy Grainger museum in the Melbourne University was closed for building works. After all that, there's still all the sports facilities, more comedy, the casino (briefly the largest in the world), more museums (musea? museae?) than you can shake a stick at, and Captain Cook's cottage, transported here from northern England, which I actually find kind of odd. It's not like this city has nothing of its own, that it needs to bring an entire house 15,000 kilometers as a footnote for the guidebooks.
All of this is in a relatively central area -- I haven't even been to St. Kilda's yet, although that's today's adventure -- which is much more easily traversed afoot than is the sprawl that is Sydney. Yup, as far as cities go, this is a definite keeper!

I'm sure they are glad we approve.

Botanical Extravaganza!

Good Friday indeed!

This morning started pretty well, considering that the phone rang at 7:15 on our day off. There aren't too many things that will make me smile after a start like that, but it was a call from our Realtor, Curt, to let us know that there was an offer on our house. A long-awaited, much needed resolution to the Fairway Drive Dilemma is another step nearer. Ahhhh...

After church, we then went to a national park just north of Perth, and had a GREAT hike. A little over 10K of sandy, dirty walking amongst the Tuart trees and kangaroos, finishing off in time to watch the sunset over the water.

For those of you who are keeping score, that's two weekends with time together. This may work out, after all! Of course, I work all day on Easter, so we'll have to see how things go from then on. We'll keep y'all posted.

A weekend away -- Margaret River

Remember all those promises of frequent updates when we got internet at home? Yeah, we remember, too. The new excuse is, "There will be more frequent updates when we have wireless internet at home." This will give me some time to come up with a new reason for our poor showing at blog updates.
So, this is Nathan, and for this update, I want to share a little bit about our weekend away -- the first weekend that we have had free together to get out of town a little. We got a chance to spend some time in Margaret River, a sort of Napa Valley of Western Australia, and a great place to blow the diet.
We stayed at a B&B called Bewitched, whose proprietor was named (i'm not making this up), Samantha. They only have accomodation for one couple, so it was nice and cozy, and we ate roughly 8 squillion calories for breakfast every day. Which was nice.
We can still pass for tourists, especially when Kris wears that red hawaiian shirt that we picked up in New Zealand, so we felt okay about going on a canoe tour of the area. We felt even better when we found out that 18 of 23 were from Perth. We have now officially eaten Bush Tucker, from Tasmanian Pepper corns, to desert limes, to emu (Kris), and witchity grubs. Mmmmm. We even found out that there is an edible form of the ice plant, called a pig's face, or bain. Salty kiwi flavor, who knew?!
This last weekend was also a big international surf competition at Margaret River -- we got to see the women's finals and presentation of the trophy. Pretty cool, and something that we're not likely to get to see in Minnesota.
The rest of the weekend was spent in gastronomic bliss, doing wine tastings, cheese tastings, olive oil tastings, eating ocean trout and fennel, rhubarb brulee, and ending up having lavender and honey beer at the Bush Shack Brewery. A trip to Kent's glass studio in witchcliffe was a highlight, as was seeing the grounds and art collection at the Leeuwin Estate.
We had a special treat for Palm Sunday, though, when we went to the smallest church ever. Not just a small congregation (there were 7, including us), but we actually made the building feel full. Everyone was very pleasant, and we went up to the cafe as a group afterwards to talk about water rights and the new restaurant coming into town.
All in all, a fulfilling weekend.
(photos to share, just as soon as i charge the batteries!)