Days 250-257 Wed.-Wed. December 26, 2007 – January 2, 2008
Melbourne, Australia
Our time in Melbourne was a bit confusing. Over our nine days in Australia’s second largest city, we ended up switching hotels four times. While this sounds a bit crazy, arriving in Australia on the week between Christmas and New Years is nothing if not chaotic. Our first two nights were booked prior to arriving, but after that we had to keep switching hotels in an effort not to go broke. It turns out that the holiday season is one of the peak times of year and hotels price their rooms accordingly. Also, to add another shoe to the fire, we were originally going to rent an apartment and stay in Melbourne for a while, so during this time a futile search for apartments was conducted on a daily basis. In regards to the apartment, we eventually figured out that the timing just wasn’t right.
While there was chaos in switching rooms every couple of days, we also discovered relatively quickly that fatigue was playing a factor as well. 37 days of non stop touring in New Zealand coupled with the previous six months of travel left us in need of some rest. The result of all of this was that we didn’t seem to have a lot of energy in Melbourne and didn’t see very much of the city. I am neither saying this was good or bad, but we have learned to rest when our bodies say so. The other realization we came to in Melbourne was that Australia is more expensive than we originally planned for. With the US Dollar so weak, Australia works out to be measurably more expensive than the United States and New Zealand.
Note: The rest of this post was lost due to a data failure and was not able to be recovered. See the photo gallery after the break.
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