Road Trip to Melbourne

After a lovely dinner in Katoomba of pizza and our favorite red wine, and a miserable night sleeping in a parking lot and freezing our butts off, we headed to to Woolongong. A bar tender at the local brewery told us it was the local basketball team's last game... ever! After a few jugs we decided to go to the game and had a fun night. We kept heading south working our way towards Melbourne, stopping in boring little towns that you've never heard of. One night our van was accosted by a big kangaroo, Alix was looking out the side window and didn't see it jumping across the road until it almost slammed into her window and she let out the most bone chilling scream... ever! We decided not to drive much further that night because the kangaroos were a bit jumpy. We stopped at the wetlands pictured above for sunset and some delicious canned chili... The mosquitos were fierce so we retreated to a parking lot in the next town for a good nights sleep. We headed to Wilson's Pomonatory National Park the next day, but we had to turn around because it was literally on fire, then finally made it to Melbourne to stay with Brigitte, a high school friend of Alixs' mom.We did the typical tourist track in Melbourne, Botanical Gardens, beaches, monuments, pubs, more pubs. Waking up in Brigitte's driveway was a glorious moment, stepping out into the morning sun, in our underwear, to be greeted by the shocked and awed stares of the bourgeois modernites that Melbourne seems to be full of. Our last few nights we spent couch-surfing with Tim the engineer in Sydney. We watched street theater and wandered through more botanical gardens, then hit the pubs before catching a train, which we fell asleep on, fortunately Tim lived at the end of the line so when the conductor jostled us we were right where we needed to be. Tim was a great host, and even made us pancakes at 4am before driving us to the train station to catch our flight to New Zealand.