A Melbourne Weekender

A Melbourne Weekender. A Melbender. After 4 crazy busy days working behind the scenes at an international health sector improvement conference in Melbourne (and, unfortunately for the delegates, in front of the scenes too sometimes) the conference organising crew headed to the bar and celebrated a job well done. This gave me 5 precious minutes with our Chief Executive - with one (1) beer inside me, I decided to use these moments to persuade him to do Movember this year and then showed him my excellent impression of a velociraptor. Networking is so overrated.

Next day, I wake up in a foreign country slightly jaded, Sarah is next to me (good job) after flying in at midnight, I'm thrust the hire car keys to a diddy motor and I'm let loose on the manic streets of a city nearly as big as NZ's entire population. Crumbs. 

The safe tactic of straight line driving led us out the city and into some great bush forest. Here's me and our sweet wheels, Will.

ROAD TRIP!

The straight line took us out through the Yarra Valley and the Dandenong Ranges, where we drove to the top (a thin layer of snow on the floor - they never showed that in Neighbours) and admired the amazing view.

G'day to that view.

And ate a pie I had stuffed in my pocket.

Tasty.

For those of you wondering why we named our car, there's no sensible answer.
For those of you wondering why we named our car Will, here's a clue. Guess in the blog comments please.

Will.

After a day of seeing the sights, we headed into the lovely little town of Healesville - a popular getaway for Melbournians. Melbournians love good food and wine, so we thought we'd be in good company. Our accomodation for the night was in the top floor of a pub. With more than one (1) beer inside me, but less than three - I fulfilled a lifelong ambition and crawled up the pub stairs to our bedroom. Sarah had pre-planned breakfast whilst visiting a cheesery the previous day. And no-one in the world was surprised.

Sarah's creative breakfast...

Day 2, and we headed to the Healesville Sanctuary for a couple of hours after many a person had told us it was a must visit. With moderate expectations, we walked in and were blown away - reverting to being kids and loving feeding all the animals. Australia has some pretty crazy wildlife!

Dingo pups.

Including, of course, Kangaroos.

A good velociraptor impression, but a bit lazy.

Sarah then had the chance to feed some bonkers emus their lunch. One of them liked apples a lot and hated everything else. It spat a lot of lettuce out at us.

29 going on 2.

Next up was my turn to feed the pelicans. Such happy little guys, look at those smiles!

What do camp horses eat? HAYYYYY!

By now, we'd planned to have left. But next up we were walking into the birds of prey show. Also incredible with the birds swooping round above our heads.

Check out those faces!

This was a big boy...

Like a fighter jet

Power!

But some of the birds were a bit smaller...

And some even smaller still...

And then to the colourful:

Hello, hello.

So Aussie wildlife is pretty darn cool, but Sarah had something on the top of her list that she still hadn't crossed off.

Still busy searching.

We'd caught a glimpse of the koalas in their trees earlier in the day, but they were all asleep. A quick visit later (we'd been there about 4 hours by now) and mother and baby were awake. Cute.

Cuddle monsters!

The zoo keeper reliably informed us that chlamydia is rife amongst the koala population which slightly took the cuteness off these little critters, until they went for a little walk.

Finally we'd had enough (read: we had to head back to Melbourne to get Will home on time) so headed to the city for Stage 2 of the Melbender, the city break. More to follow soon!