Marci and Steve Go Back to Europe

  Really?? ….come on now, could it really be any good??? Saturday morning, nine am, and our hostess had offered to drop us in South Melbourne, just a ten minute car ride from South Yarra. When we are in cities, we love the museums and the great food but, we are also all about seeing the neighborhoods - the established ones where people live and the up and coming ones being gentrified. J suggested South Melbourne for a bite and boutiques and its Market, so, of course, we did it all.  Let's have a bit if a primer on brekky here. They have very different combinations of what comes on toast for breakfast. Steve had a pot of baked beans and chorizo and creamy feta with his toast, while I had smashed avocado, tomato, basil and yes, delicious crispy Aussie bacon, which is somewhere between what we have back home and Canadian bacon. The brekky menus do have eggs but lean heavily in the direction of either interesting muesli/ fruit/ yoghurt combos ...

Two days ago, the halfway point on our trip snuck by without notice. We can't believe we only have another four weeks to go. Melbourne is the perfect midway stop. It is an exciting place to spend five days busy  from morning to night  before we head to laid back New Zealand. And having a lovely apartment, not in the heart of the CBD, gives us the break and slight normalcy to our days that you can start to miss when traveling for so long. We get to do laundry, pay bills and catch up on ironing and reading. Sounds boring and un-vacation like but this stuff has to fit in when you are gone for so long. Seems we are back in our city sort of routine, up and out early and go, go going all day long straight through to an early dinner before heading home by  8:00  or so. We thought we would maybe do tickets to a show here, but only Elton John piqued our interest and tickets to the sold-out show were going for $1,200 AUD. I know we don't like him that much.  Tod...

From our home in Melbourne, we can walk into the city. It's not far and the fastest way is through the Botanical Gardens. We left about 9 A.M. It was a clear, sunny day with the promise of a breeze and temps around 80, just the kind of day where you can keep going and going.  The Gardens were beautiful, rivaling, no, surpassing Central Park. They were surely not as big, but they were densely planted with different types of gardens, well marked. There were lakes and amphitheaters, summer outdoor cinemas screening  The Suffragette  and great looking cafes. Not sure if we were just slow because we were enjoying the stroll but it took us about 25 minutes or more to cut through and get across the Yarra River to the CBD.  The riverfront is so well planned and developed....just like Philly, ha, ha, HA, HA! We headed down the stairs for a coffee/ brekky stop along the water and saw the river boats, just waiting for cruisers.  I probably sh...

NOTE: still having a bit of difficulty in finding fast internet to post, so the 'PSS' from yesterday's blog did not upload. Here is the last drop of the Barossa and like the last drop of a good bottle of wine, our last meal was quite good too. PSS: Since we still have no internet to post and today we are traveling, I might as well add a little food porn from our dinner last night. Though it is a surprise set menu, the nice thing is, we are each served different dishes every course. Of the total of six plates, five were great. The sixth was probably good but it was way too sweet for either of us, even though it was a dessert.  Starters were a cold tomato soup with fresh peas, watercress and prawn and fried oysters. Mains were venison (that tasted totally like tender beef) over onion purée and lentils and chicken (again so tender and moist from the sous vide technique that it was hard to recognize it as chicken) with baby caramelized onions and potato...