10/24

In 2006 Jenn and I had a good opportunity to go to Australia.  She was in a lab in Baltimore and her PI sent her to a meeting in Melbourne.  We decided we would take off about ten weeks and see both Australia and New Zealand.  The company I worked for would not authorize that much leave so I was forced to quit my job.  We packed all our things into storage and gave back our apartment.  It was a little unnerving, it felt a bit like we were planning to never return.

Early in the morning we caught our flight from Baltimore to Denver.  We had used a travel agent to help us plan the trip, and at her suggestion we planned an 8 hour layover in LAX so we could leave the airport and go to Santa Monica.  That didn’t work out and just made the very long flight from Baltimore to Melbourne longer.  After LAX, we had another stop in Auckland, then on to our destination of Melbourne.

We arrived in Melbourne in the morning.  We were extremely tired but we were going to try to stay up and go to bed at a reasonable bed time.  First we checked into our hostel.  This was the only time our hostel was not a private room so we were in a co-ed room with about 6 bunk beds.  We went to a grocery store for some food then wandered around St. Kilda for a bit.  We couldn’t hold out though and went to bed for a long, long time.

10/26

Did the Great Ocean Road tour.  On the tour we saw Bell’s Beach, a shipwreck site, some Australian rain forest and several ocean formations including the 12 apostles and London bridge.  We also saw a house from Mad Max.

The tour was pretty good and we got to see Koalas right off the highway.

The next day we visited Queen Victoria market, the botanic gardens and the shrine of remembrance.  It was a lot of walking.  The National Gallery of Victoria and the Ian Potter Center were fascinating museums.  Jenn had to attend the conference for the next few days so for dinner those nights we walked to different areas of town, visiting Chinatown and Little Italy.