After a red-eye flight from Bali to Melbourne, we arrived to a grey and somewhat showery day…but who cared…it was Thanksgiving Day AND Chanukah and we were going to see David!!! YEAH!!!!
Since we arrived so early, and we couldn’t check into our hotel yet, we decided to go on a 2-hour walking tour of Melbourne which was a great orientation to the city…even in the sporadic drizzle.
Our hotel in Melbourne was a brand new high-rise building, with 16 floors available, and they hoped to finish the final 7 floors by the end of December. We had a beautiful ultra-modern hotel room with kitchenette and a small table and 3 chairs in front of large floor- to-ceiling windows looking at beautiful Melbourne, the Queen Victoria Market, the construction of several other high-rise buildings, and we could even see David’s apartment building…just a short 5 minute walk away!
Since I couldn’t find restaurants offering Thanksgiving dinner, I opted for going to a grocery store, buying a rotisserie chicken, instant mashed potatoes, rolls, frozen veggies, cookies and beer! It was sooooooooo great to see David (after he finished his day of working on his school project-job), and we had a FABULOUS Thanksgiving dinner in our hotel room!!!!!…and celebrated Chanukah, too!!!
The next day, after catching up on much needed sleep and laundry, we met up with David in the afternoon to walk around the city. David is a great tour guide and has really learned his way around! Melbourne is a great city…incredibly vibrant and young! I love the street art which is so common on “lane-ways”, the trolleys, and the architecture in Melbourne. The architecture is both classical and traditional, as well as eclectic, edgy and very eccentric…one buildings has what looks like large blobs of green slime on top, another was designed to look like the windows are broken, and I love the quirkiness of what looks like the library is half-sunken into the sidewalk!
The next day we went to the Melbourne Zoo with David (who has WPI colleagues doing their project work there), and then went to the St. Kilda suburb to enjoy some beach time on a beautiful and warm day. Loved just walking around this really cool beach suburb and watching all the beautiful kite-surfers on the water, and enjoyed some open-air dining near the beach.
Loving every single minute with David…
After 3 days together, we said goodbye to David, as the next day he was going with his WPI classmates to tour the Great Ocean Road, and we were heading for Phillip Island.
The highlight of our day trip tour to Phillip Island (about a 2 hour drive from Melbourne) was to see the nightly emergence of thousands of penguins from the ocean at dusk as they “parade” across the beach and up the shrubbery back to their burrows to feed their young (after a day or two searching for food and feeding in the ocean) and/or rest till the next day. These are small penguins, but watching hundreds and thousands (nearly 4,000 every night) emerge from the breaking waves and cautiously waddle up the beach and up pretty steep hills and dunes was amazing!!! And you’re able to get really close to see the penguins as they waddle alongside these raised walkways and squawk and interact with each other, and even have sex along the way…yes, we saw that, too!!! All of it was so much fun!!!!! We don’t have any photos we took from this experience because they are very strict on not allowing any photography because the flash of cameras hurts the very light-sensitive eyes of the penguins…but we downloaded a photo from their website of the little penguins on their nightly trek.
Earlier that day we also stopped at an animal park where we saw koalas, and lots of kangaroos (and fed them, too) and that was really fun!…but, a few days later that experience was overshaddowed by seeing so many kangaroos and koalas in the wild!!!
Thoroughly enjoyed the cosmopolitan city of Melbourne!…but the absolute best part of Melbourne was just seeing David…who we’ll see again in Fiji! And now we’re looking forward to our next excursion where we’ll take 3 days to explore the Great Ocean Road, where David just went!