Saturday, May 19, 2012

Melbourne, Australia (Day 1-3)

Day 1-3
(Days will be numbered from when Natalie arrived in Melbourne Friday, May 11
Things that happened before Natalie arrived will be labeled Conference)

Flinders Train Station
 

From the airport we took a shuttle to a train station.  I met Dallas at the Train Station and then we rode a Tramcar to our hotel.  It was quite the fiasco.
Picture us: Each with 2 large suitcases getting on and off tramcars several times.  We ended up walking almost a mile pulling our suitcases behind us before we made it to our hotel.
(Pro Tip: Next time, get a taxi)
Riding Tramcar...without the Suitcases
Melbourne is covered in these gorgeous green city parks. They're everywhere, and it makes me sad (but not all that surprised) that Arizona doesn't have anything like this.

On our way to Melbourne Temple.
This is Dallas' first time driving on the right side of the car and left side of the road. Very scary, and required both of us to pay really close attention to keep the car on in the correct lane:-)



The Melbourne Temple


 It still hurts my brain to look at these pictures and think about driving on the left side of the road.

Serendip Sanctuary

This was a really cool zoo/park/sanctuary on the outskirts of Melbourne (unfortunately on the exact opposite side of the city as the temple. We did a lot of driving). It's one of those places where you're actually in the pen with the animals. Which was weird when you're the only people in the park because you didn't get there until 45 minutes before the park is supposed to close and it's about to rain. 



Our first glimpse of kangaroos. You can't get into their pen, probably for our protection as much as theirs.

I think Natalie is rather excited about seeing real life kangaroos in the kind-of wild.


In the background, you can see a dirt path that goes along the fence. We walked past these guys and said "Oh cool! Wallabies!" and took a bunch of pictures. Then we continued on our walk, through a very impressive bird display... and into the pen with the wallabies we just got excited about. We weren't sure we were supposed to be there, but they didn't seem to mind, so we took a bunch more pictures, from the other side of the fence.





No, I have not been photoshopped into this picture. It was dusk and our camera doesn't like dusk.

We road a Tramcar around Melbourne while we ate a fancy dinner.  It was a lot of fun!



Here it comes...



Our head chef was supposedly a recent winner of the Iron Chef competition... which made us wonder how you go from winning Iron Chef to making dinner on a tramcar. The food was really good, but it seemed like an unusual career choice.


Sunday Morning we headed off to the Airport for our flight north to Brisbane.
Goodbye Melbourne.

1 comment:

Cami said...

I Love the row of GREEN trees!i hope the driver on the dinner train ride didnt make any abrupt stops because I am pretty sure your food would spill everywhere. Looks like the first few days were a blast cant wait to see more!