Well as we were getting sick of paying for accommodation and hiding in our room in Sydney whilst we waited for Hugo to be ready we hired a car. We were going to Melbourne. We had friends like Brooke and Jaimie and Jeff in London. Gem also has family in Melbourne, although hopefully under the circumstances of surprise they will understand if we don’t ‘drop in’.
We picked up the hire car and headed out. As our sat nav was in Hugo, we had to hire one of them and it was so archaic. Our current sat nav is like a flat screen TV, like most of them are today. This sat nav was like a CRT TV. It was massive, and a little crap. A bit cheeky to charge for something that is so out of date.
The drive was around 900km. We took our time stopping at an ARB store to dream about all the stuff we could give Hugo. We stopped at the Dog on the Tucker Box in Gundagai. We then made another stop in Holbrook when we saw a submarine sitting on the park on the side of the road. In actual fact we discovered that it was the replica of the submarine above the waterline, but it was enough to get us to stop.
We did learn a little bit about the Australian Navy’s role in Gallipoli and the first world war, so it was quite a good little learning opportunity.
With all our distractions it took us about 10 hours to get to Melbourne and to Brookes place in Port Melbourne. She had a gorgeous little house which she shared with a guy called Gerard, who was kindly, happy for us to stay.
We went to the local restaurant and grabbed a ‘Parma’ (apparently all the rage in Melbourne) and some drinks. We were eventually forced out by the key shaking and till clanging of the waitress so we went to the bottle shop next door picked up some wine and beer and continued our reunion back at Brooke and Gerard’s place.
Brooke had had a pretty hard time of it since arriving in Melbourne and had decided that she wanted to come back to Perth with us. So it was arranged we were going convoy.
Us girls went to bed quite late. The boys even later, apparently they had a bottle of whisky (to start) and finish. Brooke was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of her room practically forcing us to take her bed. She didn’t stay there for long though Dunc’s drunk breathing/snoring kept her awake although didn’t seem to bother Gem to much. It must happen so often that she is used to it ;)
