Sandy lived in Melbourne in 1968, so didn’t really feel like a tourist.  I visited Melbourne very briefly in 1984 when we lived in Australia with the girls, but this time I saw much more of it.  I loved Melbourne, it has the feel of a nice European city, not at all like Sydney which feels quintessentially Australian.  I loved walking into town from Jen and Ben’s house (about an hour’s walk) and met Jen from her office a few times for coffee, shopping, girl stuff and just walking home together.

 

Jenny and Ben have loads of mates in Sydney, new and old, and Jen’s hen party packed a Melbourne tram for a supper tour of the city.  It was a horrible wet evening but nobody cared.  No-one was interested in the sights anyway.  Far more appealing were the cocktails, the 4 course dinner and to round it off, the condom cake supplied by Ben’s Aunty Gaye.  We finished off the evening with a visit to the casino, a glitzy but uninspiring cavern of a place, surprisingly like the one in Southampton, full of dreary looking people on poker machines and drunks who wanted to talk to us.

 

Sandy and I came and went, doing little recce trips up and down the coast and into the bush.  Things hotted up as friends started flying in from the far flung corners of the earth, and 59 Pridham Street got very busy.  Robyn arrived, did some Melbourne touristy stuff with us  and spent a couple of nights in a Melbourne backpackers on her own.  I don’t think she was on her own for long, she came back very tired and hung over.

 

Then on Friday November 4th, we packed up the car and headed for the wedding venue, Balgownie Winery in the Yarra Valley, leaving Ben and a few trusted friends to have a quiet (?) final evening in Melbourne before the big day.