Our first day in Melbourne and our first time in a big city since Perth, which was a lot smaller. The sun is shining, there is little breeze and it’s warm - a good start.
The hotel is in an excellent position for exploring and despite buying two ‘MiKi’ tram cards, we only used them once in the evening as we walked everywhere in the day. Colin managed to do some more family tree research and we even found the Immigration Museum and the Victoria Genealogy Society who have agreed to undertake some more research so we may finally find out what happened to Colin’s Grandma whom he never met and who appears to have emigrated to Melbourne from Tooting in 1913, traveling on the Ballarat ship. We also attempted to get Colin’s sunglasses fixed but to no avail although we met a really helpful guy in the Oakley shop who is contacting someone in the UK for us!
We walked along the Yarra river which is so green. The city is a great mix of original buildings from the mid 1880’s to modern high-rises. I already like the city - it has large green spaces, lots of trees and some excellent coffee shops. Everything seems to have signs explaining about the history which does delay our journey somewhat as Colin reads them all. This is my first view across the Yarra towards the SouthBank where there are some great cafes and public art.
Before we left the UK we had contacted Kelly (Hester’s husband Brian’s daughter) and her partner Mark who we had met in July last year at Hester and Brian’s wedding. As they live in Melbourne, or at least just south of the city we arranged to meet up. It was rather surreal traveling on the tram to St Kilda’s beach by Luna Park to meet people we had only met once before but when we caught up it was like meeting old friends. They showed us around the area and St Kilda’s only reinforced my positive feeling about the city. Amazing views across the marina towards the city. We did hope to see the penguins returning home but we were just a little too early. We chatted all evening at a good Italian restaurant and Gulliver bear finally got to meet Kelly’s John Bear and we photographed them together - it was a lovely evening and Mark held up to Colin’s questions about Melbourne ad the entire of Australia.
