Melbourne & The Great Ocean Road

Melbourne is a fantastic city, and like Sydney, it is rated amongst the top cities in the world to live. Melbourne feels like a large Ottawa, in the summer!! The Yarra river weaves through the city offering great river side bike trails and parks. The city is famous for its laneways and arcades - narrow cobble stone pedestrian streets lined with cafés and restaurants....and every tourist in town. Being further south in the state of Victoria, Melbourne's weather can be more extreme than Sydney's. We just missed a few days of 40+ degrees and luckily enjoyed some cool evenings watching tennis.
From Melbourne we drove the Great Ocean Road. This is a famous stretch of highway that hugs the coast west of the city. The ocean is rough here with powerful waves and wind shaping the cliffs. The most picturesque section of the coast is called the twelve apostles - a group of rock pillars still standing as the waves erode their base. Along the way we saw our first koalas in the wild and a section of rainforest with 200+ foot trees.

 

Australian Open

The Aussie Open marked Paul and my first attendance at a Grand Slam tennis tournament, and the first step toward our goal of a spectator's career slam (attending all 4 Grand Slams). What a beginning it was! We had tickets for four sessions - the 4th round, two quarters and a semi-final. Rod Laver Arena is smaller than we expected and than it appears on TV. Although I doubt there is a bad seat in the venue, we were blown away by the location of ours. Making our way to them for the first time we kept walking down the stairs, getting closer and closer to the court, before arriving at the 8th row. I felt like someone important! While at the tournament, we saw a rejuvenated Roger Federer beat Andy Murray, as well as every man's dream match-up: Canadian up-and-comer Eugenie Bouchard vs. Ana Ivanovic. Watching Genie win that quarter final match will probably go down as the most exciting live tennis viewing experience of my life. Some other top players we saw were David Ferrer, Tomas Berdych, Li Na, Aga Radwanska, and Grigor Dimitrov, as well as doubles champions Daniel Nestor and Bob & Mike Bryan. Jenn

Sunshine

The sun in this country is intense! Jenn and I have already slapped on about five summer's worth of sun screen. We lathered up again this afternoon and headed out to do the coastal walk from Bondi Beach to Cogee with some friends. It was summer in full swing on Sydney's beaches. There were runners, walkers, dogs, kids, and friends enjoying bbq and beer on the beach. (yes, on some beaches a responsible adult can decide to drink or not...what a concept). The water was cool but refreshing after the 5km walk.
This past week we enjoyed a trip to one of Australia's famous wine regions, the Hunter Valley. This area is made up of small wineries producing very good Shiraz and Semillon. No Yellow Tale found up here. On one of the tours the host described that "yes, all the wine is hand picked. We pick in the early morning. There are less snakes then".