We stayed in Eden for 2 nights and a day to make sure we didn't spent too long cooped up in the car. Friday was spent exploring the town, and driving to an amusement park just out of town. Think All Fun Water Park with less water slides and lots of other fun stuff to do too. There were two water slides, both very fast and fun, a go-cart track, a roller coaster, mini golf, a giant magic carpet slide, a tobaggan hill (luge without snow), life-size dinosaurs with sound, a giant maze, and big playground for the little ones. And a day pass to go n everything unlimited times was only $33! We decided that this was well worth it, and we spent the better part of the afternoon doing just about everything lots of times. It turned out to be the perfect time to go too, because the kids were still in school, it was the beginning of the summer so there weren't many tourists, and summer rates were not yet in effect! So there were no lines, and there was maybe 15 other people in the park besides employees. Free reign! Here's some pictures.
Yes, they let Jeremiah ride with me!
We woke up the next morning at 5am in order to be really sure we would make it to the wedding on time. With no detailed map of Melbourne and the surrounding areas it was a bit of fun trying to find the way to the little town of Mornington. But it's alright, amazingly enough we only took one wrong turn, and got there with 2 hours to spare! However, we still managed to arrive at the wedding about 3 minutes before it started. How did you manage that you ask? Well, we forgot the invitation on our fridge back here in Canada, so that was the first hurtle. We thought we had overcome that one by calling Auntie Jill from Cathleen's house and getting the information off the invitation, but somehow the scrap of paper that we had written it down on got lost in our travels. Strike one. Strike two was that the town had no internet cafe's so we could get the info off of Marc's Facebook. We went to the info center and found a map of the area, knowing that seeing the name of the beach would trigger our memories. It did, so we headed to Mills beach in search of an assembling wedding party. We saw one from up on the cliffs above the beach, so now confident that we still had an hour and a bit to kill, we got changed, I fed Jeremiah, and we wandered the beaches and eventually wandered toward the crowd. Just as we were a few hundred feet away the bride came out from between a couple of the beach huts. We looked at her, then each other, and knowing what the other was thinking we both said "uhhh... that's not Kate..." at nearly the same time. Panic then ensued. There was less than half an hour to go untill the wedding was supposed to start. Marc jumped in the car and ran to the other info center we had passed on the way into town and thankfully they had the internet. After explaining our situation they let him check his Facebook to make sure we had the right beach. We did! So he came back to us at the beach, and told me what he'd found out. So we parked ourselves on the beach a little ways from the wedding in progress, thinking that we just had to wait for it to be over for Mik and Kate's to start. Another confused looking couple headed toward the wedding (much braver that we were), talked to some of the people there and headed back toward us. We stopped them to ask if they too were looking for the Coles/Walker wedding and they told us they were, and that the fellow in the other wedding party said it was on the other side of the point. 5 minutes to go... With not enough time to get back to our car, we literally ran dow the beach and around the point, to see halfway down the adjacent beach, another wedding assembled and just about ready to start. Needless to say we made it, but only just. They had delayed it by 10 minutes because of the apparent confusion, and thankfully we were not the only ones to get the location wrong.
The wedding was gorgeous.
If you look very close you can see the skyline of Melbourne in the background of that last photo. We stuck around for part of the casual reception, but Jeremiah was getting extremely tired after such a long day, so we called it an early night and headed for the Hostel at around 8. We felt so much like the old couple who has to leave early to put their kids to bed, but that seems to be the norm these days!
Sunday was a day of travel back to Sydney and packing like mad as our flight was to leave at 3:30 Monday afternoon.
The trip home was similar to the trip there in the sense that things were lightly delayed by an accident again, this time a car hit the bus we were on and we had to transfer to another one. Why can't people see the huge vehicles in front of them?? Planes, busses, yeesh! Anyway, no one was injured or anything, it was just a minor delay. Our travels home took us on a bus, a train, two planes, a van a ferry and a car. Pretty well every mode of transportation possible besides a bike! But we got hoe safe, and that's what matters. This is what we returned to though!
I tell ya, stepping off the plane into snowing and -2 was a little bit of a shock after coming from 35 degrees and sunny. Home sweet home! Haha!
I tell ya, stepping off the plane into snowing and -2 was a little bit of a shock after coming from 35 degrees and sunny. Home sweet home! Haha!