Melbourne, Australia

“Come to Australia, you might accidentally get killed…”

We knew that we'd be making a trip to Australia while in this part of the world, but didn't really have a plan for where to go or what to do. Noticing a theme here? We'd love to get into the Outback and experience a bit more than city life and your typical tourist hotspots, but looking at our budget, we realized that trip would best be saved for later. We have an ever-growing list of travel goals that involve seeing things more in depth than just a week or two can provide, and Australia has been added to that.

A great perk of my job in New Zealand was a bonus, delivered in the form of a travel voucher. This hard-earned bonus saved us heaps of cash on our wee trip to Australia. Thank you, Canyon Swing! We took off from Queenstown and headed straight to Melbourne, which is a nice quick flight.

Once again, Elliott and I remember we're not really city people. What is it that people do in cities?  Anyway, we checked into our super budget private room in a hostel - again feeling we're too old for hostels - and got to it. We stayed in St Kilda due to beach proximity, and did not regret it.

St Kilda is a unique, vibrant town with lots of great people-watching. We wandered around, visited botanical gardens, and kept watch for all the dangerous creepy crawlies we didn't have in New Zealand. On day two we took advantage of the Melbourne Bike Share program, where for $3 AUD each we had essentially unlimited access to the city via bike, 45 minutes at a time. We rode for a couple hours along the foreshore, taking breaks to lounge on some great beaches.

Later in the day we realized we had visited the St Kilda botanic gardens, but there's also the Royal  Botanic Gardens of Victoria. Whoa. So, we hopped back on bikes for a mission into the city to look at more cool greenery and hopefully avoid snakes. This is when my beloved Chacos failed me for the first time ever, and I learned a very painful lesson in wearing proper footwear on a bike. Thankfully a good place to hit a massive bump and find your big toe bleeding profusley is in a sports park, full of kids playing rugby, and rugby mums. Thank you, kind stranger, for sharing your kids' favorite Minions bandages with me.

Needless to say we didn't make it to the fancy gardens, but hobbled back home for a relaxed evening and sunset on the boardwalk.