Geelong

We didn't think it right to have not visited Australia before we returned home, and we really wanted to catch up with Matt and Jo Parkins so we descended upon them, in Geelong (about an hour from Melbourne), for a week. It was really lovely to catch up and a delight to meet the gorgeous Scarlett Cate.


We had a really restful week (apart from an altercation with a white-tailed spider which put me on heightened alert for the rest of our holiday!) and I fulfilled my desire to see koalas & kangaroos and to sample the vibe of Melbourne - not too hard to please really!
We saw the Australian animals at a small sanctuary and happened to be there just at the right time so we got to stroke a koala!



We also tried to see them in the wild at a local reserve but there was some confusion about entry times etc so we only managed to experience the Aussie bush with it's flies and parrots and a passing wallaby.


We visited a working museum in Ballarat, the largest inland city in Australia. It was the region of a huge gold rush in the 1850s so you can go down a mine, visit shops and schools as they would have been, go bowling (nine pin?) and pan for gold which I was the most successful at and the amount I recovered will lead to millionaire status I'm sure!



We went to Melbourne for a day; walked through parks, had lunch at an amazing food court along the South bank, found a cute little alley/lane with coffee shops and generally enjoyed being in a big city.



In the evening we went to Tim and Catherine's (new friends we met earlier in the week who are in TOM - Catherine and I gelled over shopping and chocolate and Neil and Tim played golf so that was that!) for a lovely meal and then, apart from a brief visit to the beach on the Friday morning, that was our holiday over.