Drive to Melbourne Tuesday - December 17, 2013

TUESDAY – DECEMBER 17, 2013

BOTTOM LINE:

Drove to Melbourne via the coast

BACK STORY:

Woke up this morning with excitement and anticipation in visiting a new city…MELBOURNE!  It is considered the city of art and I was curious to see why.  At the same time, our seven weeks visit to the mainland of Australia was ending.  It has been an amazing adventure of fun, service, and God moments in meeting and sharing time with new friends.

Our ride into Melbourne was projected to be three hours and with an early start plus wanting to avoid commute traffic we took the coastal roads wanting to be at our hotel by 3pm.

Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, my mind set about bay water was entirely different than what we found.  Even with the latitude of Melbourne being the same as SF, but in the southern hemisphere we were surprised at the clarity, aqua in color and tropical appearance.  The bay was huge with the inlet on the west side.  The beaches were beautiful and sandy, some being white and others being a golden brown sand.

Bay that Melbourne is on

There were miles of modest neighborhoods built right up to the metered parking areas.  All people have access to beaches but pay a hefty parking fee to do so.  I noticed on one street that a home closest to the bay had san bags piled along the side of their yard…an indication of a looming threat?

Beach house ready with sand bags

It was delightful to find one beach filed with middle school kids in swimsuits having their life saving skills lessons.  While one group did the water activity another group did relay races and team sports.

Lessons at the beach for school kids

To my delight another beach had a row of colorfully painted cabanas that people own to store personal beach equipment.  The huts were old, weathered and leaned a little while seemingly smiling at passers-by. 

Colorful cabanas

 

Private Cabanas on the bay

The closer to Melbourne, the grander the water front homes.  What struck me most was how the homes had art built into the house design.  Although there were stately older estates, there were very contemporary ones that seemed to out number them…all beautiful in their own right.

We got to our hotel easily by 3pm, dropped off our luggage and headed out to a mall to find dinner and go to a movie.  We watched the new Hunger Games show and enjoyed it more than the first. With this movie’s ending, we will have another sequel?  Theaters hold about 130 people and once again we practically had the place to ourselves!

Talk about a private showing!??

We were both surprised that when we left the theater at 9:30pm it was still light outside!  I was thankful in that it made it easy to get back to the hotel.