Ye olde Melbourne town!

We spent a lovely 4 days in Melbourne staying at a caravan park about 20 minutes bus ride from the CBD.  Each day we got the bus ($23.70) for all four of us which allowed us on any train and tram for a 24 hours period and was a great way to get around.   Most of our time was spent around the CBD visiting the lanes and myriad of shops here and there.   

We were lucky enough to score tickets to Annie the Musical!  Great show and big thanks to Aunty Del Ross who got on the internet and did all the work for us to secure tickets.  THANKS DEL DEL DEL RING THE BELL YA GOT YA EARS ON GAL!!!  (That was our radio call to Del and Greg when they were with us for the first few months on the road UHF radio).

Let them eat cake!!!  Jessica adores Cup cakes and every second shop in Melbourne seems to be a cake shop!  Foooood glorious fooooood!

Melbourne Tea room!  The girls sampling some of the fine deserts on offer!  Indulgence and then some!

Eureka Tower Melbourne CBD...this is a typical personality shot....Kacie right up on the edge face planted to the glass leaning against it almost straining to get outside....Jessica and Kerriann very cautiously and happy to admire the view from a safer distance perhaps!  I like this photo.....?  

The wonderful Burke and Wills Dig tree (left) and The Pioneer (right)!!!!  WOW!!!!  The girls to their credit immediately recognised the three panel story to the Pioneer and one of their homework projects was to write me 300 words on the painting.  They had a choice and both picked The Pioneer.

I didn't know this but here copy past of the caption to Red Riding Hood!  This painting is a more detailed rendition of one of the designs made by the great French illustrator Gustave Dore for the fairy tale of Charles Perrauff (1628-1703), which were reprinted in Paris in 1862, Here Dore has illustrated Perrauff's original Little Red Riding Hood of 1697 - rather than the later, sanitised versions - and depicts the story's penultimate moment, just before the triumphant, and satiated, wolf bites off Little Red Riding Hood's head, Terror was often a key component in fairy tales which also had a moralising element or subtext. Romantic artists were drawn to these darker aspects of tales written for children.   GO FIGURE!

We went to Sovereign Hill at Ballarat which was pretty cool!  Especially the original Southern Cross (Eureka) Flag which is on display at the local Museum Arts centre!  Of course everyone pans for gold in the creek at the theme park but here's the thing.....! It's full of GOLD! The put about 2k worth of Gold a month depending on holidays etc...and basically 99% of people have no idea how to properly pan out gold and sit there and sift through the gravel looking for nuggets and chunks of gold....I panned  a total of 4 pans of gravel that I scooped with a shovel from no particular part of the creek and every pan had as much if not more Gold in it than I got panning in PNG last year!   It was very cool....can understand how the pioneers got Golf fever...there's something about seeing that flash of fleck after 15 minutes of cleaning....(takes me about 15minutes per pan I'm very slow).

 And there it is!!!  Every pan had this gold in it...I imagine you could spend the day there and if I were any good at it they'd probably ask you politely to leave.  Be nice to pan a few grams to cover the entry!

This one dedicated to my sister Nikki!  The Wallace and Gromit exhibition was on at the Science works.....Nik they had all the sets and stuff from the Wallace and Gromit movies etc....quirky and fun!

More to come!  We are currently in Melbourne and our dear friends the Chilvers family whom we met in the Kimberley....off to camp with wombats at Wilson's Promontory tomorrow!