Day 40, Mornington Peninsula

Yesterday was all about getting over the shock of finishing our tour of New Zealand.  Having been up at 3:30 (NZ time) we spent most of the day exhausted particularly after shopping in Melbourne.  We stayed in the Melbourne Marriott using up a batch of hotel points that I had accumulated from work.  Reflecting back on when we originally booked the whole trip we had decided to leave some time in Melbourne for catching up with old acquaintances whereas on reflection we probably should have flown directly home from Christchurch.  Nevertheless we did catch up with some people which was nice.

Firs timpression on being back in Oz is that it’s MUCH warmer here.  We have been greeted by temparatures in the early 30’s compared to NZ where I think we could count the day’s of 20 plus temperatures on the fingures of one hand.  That’s not necessarily a good thing from my point of view as i’m not a fan of the heat but seeing blue sunny skies does life the soul.

We probably still have not learnt about cramming a lot into one day as today we decided to visit the Mornington Peninsula which is an area we had not previously seen when we lived in Australia a few years ago.

Having been in NZ for a decent amount of time, being back in Australia and particularly Melbourne is a bit of a shock.  After all, about three-quarters of the entire human population of NZ would fit into Melbourne.  Melbourne is nice but we are not big fans of cities generally and driving out of Melbourne is a bit of a chore (particularly if like us you are trying to avoid toll roads).

We meandered down the coast through Frankston and Mornington eventually arriving at Portsea, our first stop of the day where we had a quick look at the old Quarantine station before heading over to Portsea surf beach for a quick look at London Bridge (well, we had to didn’t we).  We then meandered around the coast to checking out Cape Schanck (decent stop, worth a visit) before heading onto Flinders for lunch.  Little did we know when we headed into Flinders fish and Chips that we were in the presence of a world record holder.  Quite impressive but in some ways quite disgusting.

After our whistlestop tour of the peninsula we headed back up to our overnight stop in the Yarra Valley at Yering Gorge Cottages.  We drove almost 300km along the way and had to stop at around 100 red traffic lights!  Driving around Australia is a very different (and frustrating) experience to driving around NZ and while we feel there were some good things to see today, it’s not a patch on all the good things we say in NZ.  Ah well at least our property here is surrounded by hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of Kangaroos.

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