To read from the beginning, click here.
After a good night’s rest, we had breakfast and left Maggie’s for a walk in the rain to the train station to get our tickets for that afternoon. A quite easy process and we were soon walking around town. One thing we’ve noticed in both NZ and Australia is that the downtown areas are still very vibrant. Lots of small shops and restaurants with awnings covering the sidewalks so you can window shop out of the rain. Even when there are big box stores, they are located in or close to downtown in a mall, but very few malls or big box stores as we know them — well outside the downtown surrounded by macadam parking lots. Sunday morning the cafes were full of people as were the streets.
The bikes got rained on last night, so after returning to Maggie’s to pack up, the first order of business was to lube the bikes. We had done laundry last night and what wasn’t dry on the rack (inside), we popped into the dryer. We were soon packed up and loaded the bikes, said thanks and good-bye to Maggie, and headed to town for the end of the women’s race.
What we didn’t know yesterday was that the coffee and ice cream vendors were offering their products for free. We took advantage of both while we waited for the finish. There was a big screen TV showing the live broadcast, so we had a good idea of when they’d be in for the finish. Well in time to see that and make our train at 3:30. The women’s race was 160km (100 miles), and it was a close, exciting end to the race and our short stay in Warrnabool.
We headed to the train and got ourselves and the bikes loaded on. Easy to walk the bikes on and secure them at the luggage racks which had straps to secure the bikes. It was a 3 hour trip to Melbourne and we took the opportunity to catch up on communications, work on the blog a bit, and get naps. We had reservations at The Great Southern Hotel in Melbourne, very close to the Southern Cross train station. We arrived around 6 PM, got to the hotel and managed to get the bikes up to our room on the small elevators and a half-flight of stairs to our room. We then headed out for a walk in the city. I headed back to the hotel about 9:30 and Dana continued exploring Melbourne.
Back at the hotel, we tried to get to sleep, but there was what we could only imagine as a dance party going on in the room above us. We stewed for a while hoping it would be over soon, but it went on and on. Not just feet walking, but a deep tremor that kept us awake. It took two calls to the front desk to finally get someone to come and listen and they went up to the room and finally put an end to the noise. It was midnight before we got to sleep, but we finally did! Tomorrow starts our push north toward Sydney.
Leave a Reply