Melbourne

The day after Thanksgiving we headed out on the road again. This time we flew off to Melbourne to visit the crew out there. The plan was to spend a couple of days in Melbs with Matt and Laura, and then we’d all head out for a road trip on the Great Ocean Road together.

We didn’t get all that much time in the city, but the in the time we did have we did a lot of eating and there was a good amount of dancing. Almost immediately after arriving at Matt and Laura’s, they lead us out to meet up with Sabina and some other friends of there’s at Camy Shanghai Dumpling & Noodle Restaurant for a dumpling feast. On Friday nights this place gets packed due to an all you can eat special. However, I don’t think they counted on the bottomless pits our group had for stomachs. Our table placed order after order, to the point where the wait staff was giving us looks of nearly disgusted incredulity. We had a big group, and they were good dumplings – in particular the pumpkin dumpling. I have no idea how many of those I put away.

I definitely rolled out of there, but at least I was able to work off a few calories dancing later that night. We found a little dance bar that was nearly empty and pretty much took it over for ourselves.

The next day was also pretty much dominated by food related activities. Matt and Laura guided us through the massive Queen Victoria Market -- just miles and miles of food, toys, candy, clothes, and souvenirs. The object was get breakfast and load up on supplies for our road trip. We picked up loads of bread, cheese, and fruit.

Loved the cheese. Many of the cheese stalls offer a preselected assortment at a discount. You don’t to choose, but you get anywhere between 3 and 5 different cheese to try for very little money. Another nice little feature of the market is the various wine vendors. There are several offering deals to keep you coming back – some have jugs they’ll refill for you or recycle their bottles and give you a discount on the next round. Off course you can do tastings to figure out which ones you want to take home next. We had to get a couple of bottles for the road.

We spent so much time roaming around the market that we were left with very little time to see the rest of the city. The rain didn’t help much either, but we did get to ride the trolley, roam around the streets a bit, caught a couple of sights and popped into beautiful St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

There were pit stops of course. In the afternoon, we escaped the rain by stepping into Mrs. Parma’s to grab a delicious Holgate Brewhouse Temptress Chocolate Porter. It’s infuse with Dutch chocolate and it was oh, so tasty.

When it started raining again not too long after that, we met up with friends, and dove into Tiamo 2 for a delicious Italian dinner. I think if I lived in Melbourne and dove into a bar or restaurant every time it started raining, I’d get quite fat, but the arrangement suited me quite well while we were in town for just a couple of days.

On the books for that evening was something a little different. Movember is huge in Australia. All through November men grow mo’s to raise awareness for men’s cancers and depression. It just so happened that Melb’s Movember celebration was happening that night and Matt and Laura managed to get us some extra tix through a friend of theirs. We hadn’t planed for this, so we had to improvise. The invitation said to dress up in costumes or cocktail attire. Laura and I took that at face value and dressed up in dresses and wore heels. We ended up wishing we’d thought this one out better. First off, almost anytime costumes are welcome, dressing up is probably less than required. Second, it turned out the party was outside, it was cold and it had rained all day. The field was soggy and our heels sank into the muddy grass every time we took a step.

Matt chivalrously carried Laura across the grass to keep her from sinking into the soggy ground.

Greg’s improvised costume turned out much better, given the amount of time he had. He hadn’t been growing a mo, so all he had to work with was stubble. Considering that and the fact that his stubble was pretty much translucent, I thought he’d pulled it together pretty well.

Our friend Michael went another route. He was also visiting and unprepared, so he found a way to fake a mo.

Michael, his mo, and Lego man

Despite the soggy field, it was pretty fun. Seeing all the crazy mo’s and costumes people came up with was pretty amusing. Plus, they had bumper cars – and who doesn’t love bumper cars?

When muddy feet got to be too much, the group set out to find an indoor bar and ended up at The Croft Institute. This place is too cool for school . . . actually, it’s more like high school on acid. The ground floor is looks like a lab for mad scientists in training – there are beakers and vials everywhere, and even the tables are actually high school lab desks.

The upper level looks a little like the high school gym in Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Even getting to this place is a trip. It’s totally tucked away at the end of winding alley with graffiti covered walls to guide your way there.

Actually, this bar kind of illustrates both what I liked and didn’t like about visiting Melbourne. Well, I shouldn't say dislike, because we had a great time in the little time we were there. Melbs seemed like it would be a cool city to live in, because the joy would be in discovering all the restaurants and funky boutiques hidden down the ubiquitous side streets and alleyways. The opportunities for exploration and discoveries seem endless. For the same reason, it’s not quite as easy to get a real sense of the place in a short period of time. The only reason we got to go to some of these cool spots is because we had good guides. I suppose that can be said about visiting any major city, but it seems particularly true about Melbourne. The trolley is set up to take tourists on loop that goes by the main historic sites, but I feel like that doesn’t really give enough of a glimpse at the funky flavor of the place. I would definitely have liked to have spent more time there and get to know the city better . . . minus the rain, of course, I’m never super keen on rain.

An Aussie Thanksgiving

When Thanksgiving rolled around, everyone in our house was anxious to make sure it would celebrated. Since no one else in the program at AGSM was from the US, it was really up to us to throw the feast. We invited over anyone who wanted to come from their program, and we ended up with a fantastic mix of nationalities. We had Canadians, Brits, Indians, Germans, you name it. (Not hard really, since the mix of nationalities in the AGSM program was so varied to begin with.) What resulted was really one of my favorite days out of our whole stay in Oz.

All of the roomies pitched in with the cooking – and it turns out that we're all pretty damn good cooks, because it was a delicious feast. Kate and Ryan took care of the mashed potatoes, a truly fantastic stuffing, and an apple pie. Day – less confident in skills as a chef – pulled together the appetizers and beautiful cranberry, blue cheese, and walnut salad. Greg made maybe the best gravy ever. I don't even like gravy that much, but this was awesome. Alexandra, who is French and was not a roomie, but was heavily invested in the Thanksgiving celebration since she had spent many years in the US, contributed a copious amount of the requisite pumpkin pies. The amount of pies was really kind of insane, but they were delicious. Our other guests all made contributions of some kind, mostly of the alcoholic nature.

I made candied yams, and since I had the most time, I took on the turkey. I'd never made a Thanksgiving Turkey before, so I must admit I was both a little nervous and a little excited. I got my mom's recipe a few days earlier and began prepping the bird the day before. When I finally pulled the bird from the oven, I was even more nervous, since the skin was extremely brown. Dear Lord! Had I burned it???

Despite the color, it was delicious. I had rubbed the skin with copious, copious amounts of garlic butter . . . and then rubbed it with more . . . which caused the skin to cook more rapidly and crisp up, and it was actually quite tasty. The meat was moist and delicious. YAY!!! That bird got picked clean. There were NO leftovers . . . which actually made me a little sad. I love the sandwiches you make from leftovers. Also – as with anyone raised in an “ethnic” household – it's been engrained in me that feeding people means aim to have food for AT VERY LEAST twice as many guests as you have. If at all possible, a food to guest ratio of 3 or 4 to 1 is preferable. In my mom's case, the goal is always to have enough food to feed a small platoon, no matter how many guests you actually expect. In this, I clearly failed where the turkey was concerned, although there was plenty of food otherwise. However, the feasters seemed pretty . . . er . . happy.

After feeding, the group split pretty traditionally along gender lines. The women went outside to chat a while, and the men congregated around the TV. Seeing as how there was no American football game on for the boys to watch, they needed something to yell at, and somehow Armageddon became the substitute. Rowdy yelling was to be expected, however, I must admit that I was a bit shocked when they broke into song at the end of the movie . . . go figure.

Road Trip: Grand Pacific Drive and the Southern Highlands

It's been a while since I've written. I am back in Los Angeles now. In our last month and half in Australia, we travelled around A LOT. So much so that I didn't have time to write about it as it was happening. Then it was time to pack up and leave, come back, quite a few trips once we got back . . . Yada, yada, yada. But now it's time to go back and catch up. I'm backing up now to the next trip Greg and I took after the Whitsundays.

I have always travelled the American Way – We plan. We plan where we're going, we plan where we're staying, we probably even have a few ideas about where we'll be eating. Plan, plan, plan. Leave as little to chance as possible.

I've been lucky enough to travel a good deal, but I never did the whole backpacking thing. I'd never even really taken a road trip . . . at least not in the 'let's see where the road takes us' sense. Neither had Greg. The Aussies make it look so easy though. There are so many backpackers in Oz, so many hostels and cheap places to stay. There are helpful tourist info sites everywhere. When we were in Airlie, we didn't bother looking for a place to stay for our last night until that same afternoon. We went into a tourist info office and they booked the room with the large balcony and the beautiful view and reasonable price tag for us. They do make it quite easy.

It seemed like the right time to try a new style of traveling. We decided to rent a car roll with the weather. Literally. We were torn between going north to Port Stephens or south towards Jervis Bay. The weather report the morning we left forecasted marginally better weather heading south, so south we went. We loaded everything up in the car and hit the road. Actually, I was the oddest configuration possible. We knew we'd be passing some beaches, so I wanted to bring the surfboard. The only way to make it work was to put the front passenger seat down, with me riding the whole way in the back seat behind Greg. It was weird, but it worked, and so we set off, heading south on the Princes Highway along the Grand Pacific Drive.

Day 1

The weather really did dictate our travels the whole way, and it kept us guessing the entire time. Our first day it was oppressively hot and humid. The air was heavy with the rain that was certainly soon to come. In the car we had the miracle of air conditioning to keep us cool, but as far as stops for activities along the way, beaches were the option.

Coalcliff Beach was our first stop. It was the first beach we hit after making it a couple hours out of the city and winding our way down the hills and mountains around the Royal National Park. It's a tiny little beach, but completely lovely. There is a pool and a small sandy patch, but the most inviting aspect were the gorgeous rocks. They were mostly flat, like a platform leading to the ocean, but water filled the crags and gaps creating large tide pools that simply demanded that we wade in them.

Our next stop was to grab a late lunch around Austinmer Beach. The heat was oppressive that day, so after lunch we hit the water to escape the heat. There were some good sized waves, and I felt like I was actually making some progress on the board. Sadly, this proved to be the only beach day of the trip.

After covering some length of road, it was time to find a place to stop for the night. I had the number for a YHA in Wollongong, and since we didn't want to press our luck with the time, we called them and snagged a room. We wanted to shower and rest a bit before heading out to dinner – ok, really we wanted to watch the finale of Australian Idol. By nine p.m. on a Sunday night, almost everything in the smaller cities and towns is closed down. Wollongong is a sizable city, but most things were closed nonetheless. We ended up grabbing dinner at one of the only Thai places still open nearby, Thai Basil Cafe, and got enough food for dinner and the next morning's breakfast. Turns out green thai curry and rice makes a surprisingly tasty brekky.

Day 2

A cloudy morning in Wollongong

On Monday the rain hit, which made it a good day to cover some distance driving. After Eungella, we knew we could handle some mountains on a rainy day and maybe even still do some hiking during the breaks, so we headed for the Kangaroo Valley . . . or we eventually did after taking a few wrong turns. Generally speaking, it's pretty easy to get from one place to another, but the Aussies could stand to get some better street signs. Also, Google Maps and Australian street signs are not friends. They contradict each other constantly and don't always agree on what the roads are called.

What? It's funny!

The reward for these little headaches is that within a very little time and distance traveled you'll see a huge variety of landscapes. We started the day on the coast, drove over wide expanses of farmlands, and then started climbing the hills into woods and rainforests.

By the time we reached the highlands, we were hungry and found adorable Cafe Pirouette, in the tiny town of Robertson, at which to gain sustenance.

The mountains around the Kangaroo Valley were some of the most beautiful areas we went through. I think we were both a little sad we couldn't see more because of the rain. We made a quick stop at the Fitzroy Falls Reservoir. Seeing the falls was impossible because of the thick fog, but it was beautiful. But in some ways, the heavy mist even added to the scenery by giving it a fairy tale aura.

After we wound our way out of the hills and down into the actual Kangaroo Valley, we hit the Bundeena National Park for a little bit of bushwalking. The name Kangaroo Valley might be a misnomer – we didn't see one kangaroo while we were there. However, we did see some very adorable wombats!

By evening we'd made our way to Huskisson in Jervis Bay. Lonely Planet directed us to a 'good-time pub' called the Husky pub. It claimed there were great views, rowdy on the weekends, but chill during the week --- and very affordable. Neither of us had ever staid at a pub before and we figured it would be an adventure. It was.

Upon our arrival, the bar/inn keeper kindly warned us not to expect much – rooms were clean, but very, very no frills. That was pretty accurate. The inn section was separate from the pub area, and made up of a few rooms and a couple of common areas, including some shared bathrooms. While it have fantastic views of the bay, as LP had indicated, I have to say the weeknight clientele was 'interesting.' Really, there were only a couple of other guys staying the night while we were there. They were the type of guys happy to have a smoke and a drink on the balcony . . . in their underwear. But to give them credit, they were also courteous enough to make sure with Greg that I wouldn't be coming around to the balcony and find them indecent. It was also the type of place that I kept expecting to be haunted. It definitely made for an interesting stay.

Day 3

Jervis Bay is supposed to be a hotspot for dolphin and whale sightings. Very little luck for us in this respect. It was sooo cloudy and rainy that the best we got was an occasional dolphin fin popping in and out of the water on the horizon. Since waiting for the weather to clear was likely to be a fruitless endeavor, we headed out of Huskisson shortly after breakfast.

The weather on the last day of trip did get progressively better and we packed it in with a wide variety of activities into our day. It took us a while to find our first stop, the Shoalhaven Heads, but we found some really cool birds in the process.

We did finally find the Shoalhaven Heads, and we wandered around the lovely sandbars and lagoons – we had company from the flies that hover around the shores the whole while though. They're funny little buggers. They don't bite, but they like to hitch a ride whenever possible. You won't notice them around you, until you shake and suddenly half a dozen fly off of you. Frankly, they're kind of lazy.

Supposedly, the heads are a nesting ground for many birds as well. We didn't see a lot of them, but we certainly heard them. Some of them had calls that sounded like something you'd hear in a video game – a long low whistle, followed by a couple of laser-like pings. I wish I'd been able to record the sound – so crazy.

After all the tramping around the lagoons, it was clearly time to head off to a couple of wineries. It was still before lunch, but well . . . you know. . . we were in the area. There is a small burgeoning wine region between the Kangaroo Valley and the Shoalhaven coastal region. We stopped at two that day, Coolangatta Estate – possibly the biggest winery in the area – and Two Figs Winery – a one man operation. In a lot of ways, I found these tastings more interesting than a lot of what we tried in the Hunter Valley – it wasn't necessarily all great, but there were some nice, new flavors. We took home a couple of bottles from each, but for the life of me, I can't find my notes on what we chose.

Coolangata


Two Figs

It became necessary to get some food after all of that wine. We stopped in the tiny, ridiculously quaint town of Berry. Cute really isn't a sufficient enough descriptor . . . and as you might expect, they have Berry everything. You can find berry festivals during the course of the year and a Very Berry Christmas weekend every December.

We had to settle for just one lunch in this little town, and we chose a place called Hedgehogs for it's pleasant little patio area and it was lovely.

After another couple of hours in the car we arrived in Kiama, which turned out to be our favorite stop on our trip. Our travel guides really didn't do this place justice. By the time we reached this little resort town, the sun was shinning and it had turned into a beautiful day -- which probably went a long way to put it in it's best light for us.

Kiama boasts not one, but two blowholes. They are aptly name the Kiama Blowhole and the Little Blowhole. (I found the Aussies to be very direct in their naming practices. If they didn't keep the Aboriginal name or name a thing after something British, they just call it as it is.) The big blowhole is on every map of the Grand Pacific Drive. We just happened upon the Little Blowhole, which isn't as publicized, but the view is extremely pretty and worth the search to find it.

Big Blowhole certainly produces an impressive water spout. . . and it's surrounded by lots of rocks. . . and we know how much Greg and I like to scamper along rocks.

After Kiama,we booked it most of the way back to Sydney, and only had time for one more stop. We hit the Royal National Park near twilight – there was just enough light to glimpse a waterfall, take a short stroll, and watch the sunset over the Hacking River. It wasn't enough time to enjoy the beautiful park, but it made a beautiful end to our road trip and we promised ourselves we'd go back . . . a decision that in some ways, would come back to haunt us.

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