**Ahh, yes, I did travel somewhere last May, didn't I...**

Okay, it is about time I starting posting stuff from Australia. My lack of blogging about it was because the number of photographs were simply overwhelming. I have only labeled the first two days of the trip. So maybe trying to put a couple pictures and description from each day will help.

So voila, Day One in Australia....

We arrived in Melbourne after 23 hours on a plane. E. met us. She had arranged well in advance (because she is that way) for a car rental. But, there was no rental on record. We are all pretty tired, and a little giddy, but we manage to find the rental car receipt, only to discover that Budget Car Rental services more than one Melbourne and we had, apparently, rented our particular car at the airport in Melbourne, FLORIDA.

Regrouping... a theme of the trip... begins.

I am not going to lie to you or embellish this tale. They had more cars and we got one of them and were on our way. But, since to list anyone but a middle-aged, female as a driver would dramatically increase the rental fee, it was up to me to do all the driving on the trip. Sooooo. I IMMEDIATELY learned how to drive on the "other" side of the road. This leads to a couple of quick observations:

While at this point in my life, driving is completely intuitive, driving on the "other" side of the road is not.

I will be much more patient with ANYONE who drives slow, or tentatively... or has wet or extraordinarily clean windshields... or seems otherwise paralyzed with panic because they, too, may be learning to drive on the "other" side of the road.

Manufacturers who ship cars to Australia flip the locations of the turn signals and windshield washers on their cars (see above).

So, slowly.... we headed off to Geelong, the Aurora, Colorado (meaning a sprawling suburban bedroom commuting base for people who work in nearby cities) of Melbourne.

I can't say Geelong was that impressive, but was built on a bay where there were plenty of these:















And these:













We stopped in at local uni (Deakin University) to see where E. had been hanging out for a year.


In the uni student parking lot some guys were attempting to assist a poor helpless.... BABE... jump start her car. My son, who has been brought up to always help those in need, lept to her assistance, (although you can see in the image below that he was not alone in his eagerness to ease the troubles of a stranded driver).

The "assistance" went on for quite a while, and, I might add, it did not seem to bother any of these young men one bit that this young lady had no idea how to pop a clutch.

Honestly, if someone (not completely under a hormonally-induced sense of civic duty) had not stepped in to end this pattern of pushing the car up the hill and pushing it back down the hill, G. and probably everyone else whose asses you see in this picture would still be there.

Did I mention the young female was quite attractive?

G. has told me, with not a small degree of frustration, that this is NOT the picture he would have gotten if he had the camera. And the adventure begins....