A weekend in which the heroine goes to Melbourne

Yes, the much awaited melbourne trip has been and gone. Whilst it was excedingly lovely to see Melbourne, go to a wedding, catch up with MissDawn and see her new house, bugger me if it isn't nice to come home! I got to kiss and hug my little Torbenspang and his dad ever so much. It's lovely!!

However, dear readers, you probably want to hear less of that and more of my adventures. That's if you want to hear anything at all.

So, flew in Friday night and Dawn picked me up and we went back to her house, did the tour. Decided I needed to smuggle one of the lampshades home. (Don't worry, I didn't. More because the wouldn't fit in my coat then anything else)

We trotted down to a very nice cafe with amusing waiters and yummy food and drink. I like that cafes in melbourne seem to run along the bar/cafe concept. It's kinda cool. After eating an elegant sufficiency, trotted home and promptly fell asleep.

Got up bright and early Saturday morning, went down to Port Melbourne and had breakfast on the water. So lovely to stare at the water and it had this fantastic milky light quality thingy. Also very weird to be facing south. Quite convinced I could see Taswegia.


Used a very weird public toilet that is all automated. You press a button to get toilet paper, it flushes when you leave, the sink was a rectangular hole in the wall with 3 sensors that activated the soap, water and drying things. When you left, it washed itself. I'd used one in the States but it wasn't this freaky! Then drove around the bay and up around town looking at pretty buildings and stopping off at rug and lighting shops and eventually made our way home to get ready for the wedding.


Bliss looked great as did the rest of the bridal/groom party. She had the right amount of sparklyness about her. The whole wedding was lovely. Mind you, to me, most weddings are. I like them because for this one moment at least, two people are so very much in love and so very happy.
Slightly disappointed that there wasn't more italian wedding-ness about this one. Sigh!

Snday morning, we all went to St Kilda for breakfast before wandering around Acland St and the art & craft markets. Acland St has so many pastry shops and shoe shops.
What more could you want??
Fell in love with this in the park. I'm sure the eyes followed me around the park!.

After all that walking and eating and purchasing, Dawn and I continued east and up the mountains as Robyn and Jeremy left us to do the lovely drive back to exotic canberra. lucky them.
The mounatins were very pretty and we shopped and had lunch and got rained on and everything! The rain kept getting worse and as we were driving along, we noticed that the road had turned white. It had hailed a lot.
So cool, until it started hailing again. D'oh. We made it out safe and alive like the brave adventurers that we are though.

I was all alone on Monady to explore the city as I chose. I had a ball! I did lots of random wanderings along streets and laneways and arcades. I walked along the river, I walked along federation square, discovered it was as ugly as I thought, caught a tram across the river to the art gallery, wandered aound some more, had yummy food. Did a little bit of shopping, got extremly sore feet and shoulders (all my clothes etc for the weekend were in a backpack I was lugging around. I'd also shoved some beer for MrNw in there. So 'ucking heavy) and eventually got to the airport and flew home.

I was very very impressed by Melbourne and fell in love with certain areas of it. It was this delightful mix of old and new. I liked the old stuff better than the new stuff!

I wouldn't mind moving there if everyone moved with me. Who's with me?

There's more photos on Flickr and there'll be even more next month when i have more memory left to squander.