Australia Day in Melbourne (again)

History appears to be repeating itself slightly here as last year, I also spent Australia day driving down to Melbourne and spending the day here. There are however a few important differences. Like that I don't remember getting up at six last time, to make it to a shop 700km away before they closed on public holiday opening times. Driving to Melbourne does feel really close now though, after having driven to Adelaide.

Having spent all this effort to get here, we immediately wanted to make sure that our efforts didn't go to waste. This meant finding the closest patch of grass and refusing to take another step for the next two hours. It had people, loud small people, water with the occasional boat, and the rumble of something slightly bigger than the village I'm usually in. The only way to improve on that would have been a tram track nearby to add to the noises, but I guess that would have made me count as spoilt.

The item we so desperately had to get before the store closed was a camera bag (read: stone container) for which we of course also brought a camera (read: lead stones), and a tripod (read: lead weight which you attach on the side to make the stone container off balance). Back home, I've got a friend who's currently a fanatic about doing exercise everyday, so I'm sure he'll be happy to know that I was walking up and down Melbourne carrying a bag weighing over 20% of my normal weight. And once I found that the other guy put pointy stuff in the hip strap pockets, it even stopped hurting as badly.

We found out hotel room again just as the fireworks started. And while we had a beautiful view from our balcony, it was squarely pointed in the wrong direction for fireworks. Not all hope was lost though when we realised that the sky scrapers we could see from our balcony were making a decent mirror for the fireworks, which added its own little charm.

Tomorrow they promise rain and hint at thunderstorms. So we'll see how that goes. But at least it's currently warm and beautiful.