The flight over was comfortable in BA's business class but somewhat miserable in timing. The flight was about six hours in duration and took off at 8pm Singapore time which meant we landed in Sydney at 2am. This meant we each only got about an hour of sleep. Yuck. We arrived in Sydney international and needed to grab our bags and put most of them in storage since our connecting flight was on a local carrier. After getting our new sim cards for our ipads and putting our bags in storage the airport info booth attendant let us know that we would need to pay $5.50 to get to the domestic terminal. Seriously? This is the only airport in the world I've heard of that charges passengers to go from one terminal to another.... it's the same airport for goodness sake!
After our short bus ride we connected on Jet Star to Melbourne. Our goal was to check in to our hotel room and nap right away. Our plans changed a bit however when we grabbed some lunch and then walked around looking for boots for Kirstin since she was still wearing flip flops in fifty degree weather. We walked almost the entire center of Melbourne within a few hours. After peeking into a bridal store (I seriously can't wait to go real wedding dress shopping in America!) and finding boots for Kirstin we headed back to the hotel and took a four hour nap. We got up and headed out to dinner. Surprisingly, for as big of a city as Melbourne is, nothing seemed to be open. Maybe it's because it was a wednesday night, but even our concierge couldn't recommend a place that had people or bars or anything open at around 10pm. We ended up going to a shopping center and found the only place still serving food was a place called The Pancake Parlour. We got a chicken and pancake dish to split and an indulgent sweet pancake with chocolate and ice cream and "hundreds and thousands" aka sprinkles. Delicious. We saw a fun Ed Hardy like bowling alley in the same complex and decided to return the following night since they advertised there would be a DJ and would be full of people. The woman at the bowling alley even recommended we make a reservation so we did. We headed back to the hotel around midnight and both could not fall asleep until nearly 3:30am (clearly because we took four hour naps earlier). This led to us sleeping in until 12:30pm which was all right since we had covered most of city center the day prior.
After leisurely waking up at 12:30, we went to Max Brenner, a chocolate paradise I had heard so many great things about. We had some more sweets and hit the road to explore The Great Ocean Road.
Now, maybe I had built up this road too much in my mind. I imagined big cliffs winding around a mountain overlooking the ocean like in the fancy car commercials. Unfortunately, this famous road was nothing like that. It reminded me of PCH but even less scenic. However, we did stop by a few pretty beach towns and got some tapas for a late lunch and beautiful photos by a lighthouse as the sun was setting.
We made it back to Melbourne by about 8:30pm with Kirstin's amazing driving skills in the rental car. Driving on the other side of the road is tough!
We headed to dinner in the same main complex as the night before but this time there were a lot more people. We had burgers and then headed over to the bowling alley for our lane reservation. Turns out we were the only ones bowling. And the advertised DJ? Just pop music blasting over the speakers. Clearly we didn't need a reservation. We did have a lot of fun and got some great action shots out of it and danced around like it was a bar even if we were the only ones there. (seriously, the ONLY patrons there).
Can you believe it's been almost five weeks since we started traveling? Hope who ever is reading this has enjoyed keeping up with our adventures! Today this blog is now back on real time and we are on our way to our final stop, Sydney!
Sounds like a lot of fun!!! :) Are those pine trees by the ocean? Looks off to me. haha No palms?
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