Melbourne part one

Flight from Sydney interesting for smoking mountains (hopefully not the beginning of forest fires)

Tricia waiting at airport waving flag and easy journey back to her daughter's home where we are cat sitting for Noodles.

Lovely house, they are a very fortunate couple to have such a spacious home at their age, so thank-you Marian and Mark and hope you have great time skiing in Canada.

Off to Yarra valley to do wine tasting, weather rather cloudy but very enjoyable tried a couple of large wineries, rather corporate, and two small wineries with much better wines and in one case we met the winemaker. However, we did get to see in one of the larger wineries, the grapes being taken into the crusher as they were harvesting already on the south facing slopes of the valley.

We had lunch in a cheese making dairy very low key and all the better for it, and made it back for a fish supper at home.

Public transport bus,train and tram to and around Melbourne. They have a free shuttle bus about their city

and we got off for lunch at Lygon Street which is the Italian area and saw an amazing pastry shop with gateaux to die for, (but resisted!) called Brunetti's and found a good pizza place for lunch. Continued on the bus to Dockland/Harbour town area now trendy apartments

Then caught tram to get full experience to get back to centre past an 'old' building i.e. more than 100 years

and went to the Immigration museum, interesting to read about how they controlled entry including a 'dictation' test given in any language they chose, so if didn't like the look of you gave it in a foreign language! Crossed the river, still the Yarra, to the south bank where there is also an arts centre so much like London! Also home to Eureka Tower, tallest in the city where you can go up to the top and walk on a glass floor looking down over the city, not Tricia's thing so I didn't test it!

Weather cloudy all day but didn't rain so quite good for sightseeing but photo's not in Sydney class.

As the weather predicted to get better Tricia offered to drive down the Great Ocean Road the following day which proved fairly epic. Started off cloudy and it is a fair way from where we started in the northern suburbs. Interestingly, quite a large part of the road looks like this

when I would have expected it to look like this!

The road was built by returning war veterans and there is a good memorial to their efforts

After stopping for good fish lunch in Apollo Bay and then turned off the inland(!) road to take a road to Cape Otway where the oldest lighthouse in Australia is situated. On the way Tricia said look out for Koalas and lo and behold I did!

Having seen them in the reptile farm in Sydney quite strange to see them in trees by the side of the road saw 3 altogether so chuffed. The weather had cleared up by this time so lovely views of the coast from the lighthouse,

which I climbed and Tricia stayed on the ground to take my picture.

It also had a 2^nd World War radar station, brings home that it really was a world war seems so far from what I think of as the war being in Europe, totally ignoring the USA/Japan aspect!

Back on the road to The Twelves Apostles rocks (a few missing now) as limestone being eroded by the sea, fairly spectacular high cliffs and rock formations and walking back from one of the viewing stations saw an echidna so good day for wild life as well.

Long drive back on inland roads and having left at 9.00am back about 10.15pm having stopped for only about 15mins on the way back for coffee and cheese roll, really felt for Tricia who had to do all the driving. Slumped on the sofa for a well earned glass of wine and news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, seems the Pacific ring is well on the move at present, glad I've already done LA !

Quiet home day on saturday which was also sunny, so white wine and a book, what better!!