Vacation memories

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The last 5 days of our vacation sped by even faster than the first week or so.
As I had no time for photos or many posts in there I want to get down memories of the trip before they fade.
These are in the order I think of them and no other order.
I did spend a few hours editing another 500 or so photos that I’ll work on starting to post tonight.
But, until then:

Melbourne is a great city. There is a ton of things to do there. The people there were almost universally friendly. One guy in the library wasn’t, but that makes less than 1% of the folks we met which is a very small percentage in a large city.
There were days we never even took the car out of the garage as we could walk or take free trams to so many of the things we wanted to see.
It is a busy city. New Year’s Eve in particular. We got off the streets before 6 and it was still crowded. I can only imagine what it would be like after that.
They have large gardens near the center of the city that are very well maintained. Even after the big New Year’s Eve they had, it was still pretty clean. A few bottles and such about, but less than I see in Boston on a normal day, never mind the day after the big party.
The fire works NYE shook our building. I think they might have been launching them off our building as a bunch near where we were did have them on the roof. And they had cut power to the building for two hours a couple of days before. That could well have been them setting up launchers on the top and not wanting power fluctuations to mess with them.
I was a bit sad I didn’t stay up to see them, but I was just too tired after two day of getting up at 3AM to fly places.

Driving on the left has never been a problem for me. What was the problem was turn signals. I don’t remember this happening to me in Ireland, England or Wales, but in Australia and New Zealand, the side of the steering wheel with the directions was swapped. So, every time I went to signal for a turn I’d turn the windshield wipers on. I finally got used to it. Which means on my return to the US I drove home turning my wipers on and off…

Everyone kept telling me that I’d think New Zealand was beautiful. And, it was. But, Tasmania was the one that made the biggest impression on me. It was just jaw dropping beautiful everywhere we went. My wife compared it to driving through a fantasy movie landscape. Mountains draped with fog, hidden beaches with the surf crashing, cliffs overlooking the ocean, crystal clear water, giant rays that rise out of the ocean and say hi to you…
New Zealand is cool, but it just pales in comparison.
Maybe because I was unprepared for it. I expected New Zealand to look great. I had never even thought about what Tasmania would look like.
I’d love to spend more time there.

The Bonarong Wild Life Sanctuary on Tasmania was the highlight of the whole trip. After the cancellation of the Wombat patting in Healesville, I was worried that something would go wrong with our tour there. But, it was fantastic. My hope would be that we would be able to interact with one of the animals there. We got to interact with all of them.
It exceeded my expectation by a huge distance.
I also was very happy to see that their work is concentrated in conservation and reintroduction of species to the wild. The animals they let you interact with are ones that have been injured too badly to return to the wild, or human interaction doesn’t impact too much.
They run a center for injured wildlife and are building a hospital on site to help them.
This was contrasted by the other sanctuary that we went to where we were told “we like to introduce them to the wild, but only if we have enough animals to satisfy our customer interaction demands first”.
I was one of those customers. I wanted that interaction. But, I like the place that said “animals first, people if we can swing it” more than the other one.

Everyone in Australia seems to drive under the speed limit, use their signals and rarely run lights. I’m told that this is because of the large number of traffic cameras and tickets given out to people who drive fast, run lights and don’t signal.
But, there is no where else I’ve ever been where people obeyed the traffic laws as well as Melbourne.

Driving around Melbourne was like driving in the US. (Except on the other side of the road.) Driving in New Zealand was like driving in England or Wales. It is a subtle difference having to do with the frequency of roundabouts, speed limits and the width of roads. But, I found New Zealand more trying a drive because of it.

Google is flat out stupid with some of its directions. At one point in New Zealand it had me cross over a train track for a mile and then cross back because the speed limit on the north side was faster than on the south side so it “saved me time”. Waiting for the train lost me anything it would have gained. And, staying on the same road would have been easier.
I understand it optimizes for things. But, some of the decisions were not good ones.
By the end in Melbourne I knew my way around enough to say “no, that’s stupid, I’m going this way”. But, when you’ve never been some place before it’s hard to know it’s taking you a dumb way. I don’t miss the days of getting a map out and guessing. But, there is still room for improvement.

The people in New Zealand seem obsessed with jumping off of things. Or think visitors are. Every brochure in the airport was for sky diving, bungee jumping, or something similar. Out of planes, off bridges, on the sides of buildings and all sorts of combinations.
Not at all sure what’s up with that.

I did manage to touch the ocean in Tasmania and Prince Phillip island, but we never went swimming. The massive rain storm when we arrived contaminated the beaches around Melbourne. And, we didn’t bother with the pools.
But, it was still cool to touch the ocean far from home.

Renting an apartment in Melbourne worked out very well, and I think better than just a hotel room would have. We had a washer, dryer, stove and refrigerator. We didn’t cook very much, but it was nice to have the option. Having the washer and dryer was nice as we didn’t have to pack 2 weeks of clothes or find a laundromat to do them.
The one we had was also within walking distance of many things we wanted to see. Certainly in walking distance of where the free trams were that let us go other places.

They appear to be very worried about drunk drivers in Australia. A number of times we saw roadblocks set up to catch them.
I was not surprised about the one on a main road into the city on New Year’s Eve. I was a bit surprised by the one out of the city at 10AM New Year’s Day.
The one that really surprised me was the one going into the airport at 3PM on January 3rd.
I had drive out from Melbourne and not seen any problem. But, when I got off the highway and was driving into the long term parking there was a road block on the parking entrance road.
I was motioned over and a breathalyzer was held out to me.
I blew into the tube as requested and passed. So, was allowed to turn into the parking lot and park.
But, it was very strange to me that they check people coming into the airport. Do they have a lot of problems with drunk parking? People can’t get their cars between the lines?
It would make more sense to me to check people heading onto the highway, not people getting off. But, I guess they check random places and that was the place that day.

Flying to Tasmania was strange as we were never asked for any IDs or anything like that. We went to a kiosk for our boarding passes, did a normal metal detector in security and got on the plane. As the woman sitting next to us said “this must have been what it was like to fly in the 70’s…” I assured her that I had flown in the 70’s and it was pretty close. But, we didn’t have the kiosks back then.

The customs getting back into the US seemed to take forever. I guess that a plane full of people from the middle east gets extra attention from them. But, it seemed very uneven. The first line we were directed to was very slow. Seven people in the line next us went through their lane before one person in ours went through. We were eventually diverted to a third lane, waited for a person in front of us, went through and our original lane was only up to its second person.

Heading to New Zealand we also met with a very dedicated X-ray person in the safety line. She pulled 5 out of 6 bags in a row for extra inspection. It seemed to us that her shift was almost over and she knew this would make it go fast. All of the bags pulled out went through a second time and then were released.

Prince Phillip island reminded me so much of Cape Cod that it was hard not to think that is where I was. Granted, I usually go to the areas that have the rocky beaches and that isn’t what the cape is known for. But, it really did remind me of that very much.
I am sad that their gift shop was disappointing and had nothing local for it. It was just a “generic animal sanctuary” gift shop. Most of the same things I could get here.

As sad as I was that the Healesville Animal Sanctuary closed and evacuated all the guests that first day we were there, I respect that decision a lot. There were several thousand people at the sanctuary when they decided the wind had reached a dangerous level. Every one there got their money back or tickets to come back another day. We had been there a couple of hours at that point, and seen virtually everything. We were waiting for the wombat, and then going to leave. So, if we hadn’t missed wombat time, we would have had a totally free zoo day as I’d have taken the money back.
Closing must have cost them tens of thousands of dollars. But, it was very windy and those trees were swaying back and forth a lot. We had actually seen the director come out and look at them before making the decision.
Good on them for caring about the customers that much. I respect that a lot. Even though it did make me very sad at the time.
I will say though, Bonarong in Tasmania is much nicer. Their night tour costs a lot more, but is totally worth it. If we had done things in the order we had planned it would have been great.
But, Bonarong first and Healesville was anti-climatic.
Healesville is much, much bigger. Probably more than ten times the size. And, with that size comes more animals and more different animals.
But, Bonarong’s night tour you get to know them all, feed them all, and pat many of them.

Going to Hobbiton was nice. I’ve been a big fan of the book since 4th grade. They do a credible impression of a Hobbit village there.
But, I am just the kind of person to say “They got Bilbo’s Hobbit hole wrong. There shouldn’t be any windows to the right of the main door as the tunnel goes left from the front door and all windows are out to the left.”

My wife had been sad when it seemed that we wouldn’t get to go on the field of the party tree. But, after dinner we did and there was singing and dancing. So, all was well.

There is a bit of bitter sweet for both my wife and myself there too. My wife was watching Lord of the Rings when she got the call her mother was in the hospital the day her mother died.
I can’t think of it without thinking of my sister.
There was part of me that wanted to go to the gift shop and buy Galadrial’s ring (which was sitting in a case next to the register) and bring it to my sister and say “After 23 years of not talking to me I went to the other side of the world and got you this ring from the queen of the elves. Is that enough for you to talk to me again?”
I didn’t. Why waste $300 on a ring when it wouldn’t work…

One of the things that had kicked off this whole trip was my saying to my wife a year or so ago “I’ve never seen the southern starts and would like to.”
Given my luck with the weather, it looked like I might still not get to say I had seen them.
But, after sun set in Hobbiton the weather cleared enough that I could see the stars I’ve never seen before.
It’s been more than 30 years since I used to run that planetarium on weekends at the museum. I used to look at their projections there.
So, I knew them when I saw them.
But, it was very nice to see them for myself.