January 6, 2008
I hope you all had lovely holidays. We did. Mostly.
The "mostly" comes about because we arrived in Melbourne on Christmas Eve at about 8:30 pm. Not the best time to drop into a new place, what with everything closed, or closing, for the following day of inactivity. But Melbourne, a very nice city, has excellent transportation, so we were able to get the tram we needed out to the campsite and check in before they closed. It's such a relief, having some place to stay.
We spent the following day wandering around the informative and picturesque Royal Botanic Gardens, along with half of Melbourne's population, all of us there for a picnic Christmas lunch. It was lovely. And surprisingly cool. I'd been having visions of revelers passing out from heatstroke over their plum pudding, but it was probably only about 72, and I even needed my fleece in the shade.
New Years was completely different. We'd just hiked along the Lerderderg river, in the state park, back country camping (which is LOTS of fun, by the way), and, after four days of complete solititude broken only by worries about outsized spiders and marveling at nifty wildlife like kangaroos and numerous parrot species we'll tell you all about later, we emerged at O'Brien's Crossing campground at noon on New Year's Eve to the sounds people gearing up for their celebrations. We were so tired we were asleep by 10, so we missed the whole thing, but it was a fine way to spend the New Year.
We're now wandering around the goldfields, which is also fun, but we'll tell you more about that later, too.
