National Vacation-part three (Melbourne)

Melbourne added for us some challenges. We arrived at the Westin, which took us a bit to find, later in the evening only to find that we had to park in a lot that wasn't very close to the hotel. So we unloaded right out front where the whole world could see how many kids we were shuffling in. We also had to initially walk all the kids past the front desk to the elevator, hoping they wouldn't see them and try to charge us an arm and a leg for having so many. Our room had only 1 king size bed which meant that all the kids had to sleep on the floor. As it was, they wanted to charge us $60 per night for a roll away bed to put in the room. Talk about a rip off-Sydney gave it to us for free. We got settled in and even though they complained, we got the kids sorted out on the floor ( I think the Sydney Westin spoiled them) and we went to sleep for the night.



The next morning we woke to rain. Sometimes it was heavy and other times it was just a mist but it pretty much kept on in some form or another the whole time we were there. Almost all of the activities we had planned in Melbourne were outdoor so we had to get creative and look for something to do indoors. The first thing we found was the Melbourne Museum. The kids enjoyed themselves so much at the one in Sydney that we figured we couldn't go wrong. It wasn't too far from our hotel and it was only $8 per adult and kids were free-how can you go wrong? Well, let me tell you. It happened to be the first days of school holidays in Melbourne and I think that everybody and their siblings decided to go to the Melbourne Museum that day-it was crowded to say the least. We were constantly counting kids and checking to see if we had them all, losing some of their crafts and even lost a kid at one point (only for a minute-then we found her again). Even with all the craziness we still got to spend quite a bit of time at the museum and the kids had a blast.





Dinosaurs at the museum



The kids all dressed up in their Pompeii themed helmets

Had to get a picture with Yoda before we left the museum. Isn't he cool?

We did a lot of sight seeing and shopping in Melbourne and our stay there seemed so short. We tried to get to this supposedly really cool park called St Kilda's while we were there but the streets were so confusing and not labeled correctly (and we forgot our map at the hotel) so after about an hour of driving what should have taken 10-15 minutes, we gave up and went back to the hotel. We spent another whole day finding a laundromat and doing our laundry and it was really cold the entire stay there. As you can see in the pictures, we had to pull out the big jackets in order to stay warm.

While in Malbourne we recieved information from Josh's command that something might be wrong with our house. They said that somebody made an anonymous report that our house was trashed and that our cats were shut in the bedroom with nothing to eat or drink. We freaked out. We called our neighbor, who has a key, to ask her to go look but she was too busy (I won't go there) to walk next door at that moment. So we called the friends watching our house who promptly drove across town to check it out for us. They called back within the hour to tell us that everything looked fine and that our other neighbor said the only people he had seen in and out were the other neighbor, our housesitters and the AC maintenance guys. Bingo! The maintenance guys had entered our house without permission, saw Mimi, who has been quarantined in our bathroom and made up a nice story about the house to report it to housing. So then the army guys had to walk through, housing had to walk through and our neighbors came over to straighten up a bit for us. Talk about a nightmare! We've had words with housing since.

We got to go to church on Sunday and the members volunteered to set up childcare for us to go to the temple on our last day. We loaded up the car, checked out of the hotel, dropped off the kids with the ward's young women (I think they counted it as one of their service projects) and went to the temple. We got to do a session and really enjoyed our time there. We got some really good pictures of the temple too.

After leaving the temple we pretty much headed straight out on our trip-car loaded and all. We decided to take the scenic route to Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road. It's a beautiful drive and there's so much to see. We took our time and stopped at beaches and lighthouses along the way. We didn't get very far the first day. We could have made the trip in one day if we had left early but we decided to take 2 days instead and just take our time. As it started to get dark we looked at where we were and decided to stop in Apollo Bay for the night so that we could see the 12 apostles the next morning in the light.

One of the lighthouses we stopped to see along the way

To be continued....