Melbourne, Australia

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We arrived a bit early this morning. It was pretty calm when we woke up too. That was a nice surprise, but Port Philip Bay is a big well protected bay with Melbourne at the top of it. If you look at the map, you'll see that we sailed right past Geelong, our next port, some time overnight. All day today people were surprised to hear that Geelong is our next port as it is evidently only an hour's drive away and you can get there on public transportation. I hope we'll just do loops in the bay until 7am when we're supposed to drop anchor at Geelong for tendering. Again, no local could understand why we were tendering there. We can't understand either except that certainly it must be cheaper for Oceania.

Since it was so calm, we went up for breakfast. We were some of the first ashore and beat our driver/guide for the day to the terminal. We waited not long and he arrived. For some reason he had noted we were arriving at 9:30am instead of 9am. It worked out.

We had an all day tour today. We booked it last November through Viator. We paid $355.82 total then, evidently the price has risen. The actual tour operator is Australian Coastal & Mountain Tours. We were the only 2 on the tour today, so it was more than a small group, it was a private tour. Score! Since it was just the 2 of us, our guide offered to customize and made some suggestions all of which of course we agreed to. We drove directly through Melbourne, which was unrecognizable from our 2006 visit. Our first stop was in Healesville at the Healesville Sanctuary. The guide walked us through and made the most of our time there since he was so familiar with it. W loved the really active platypus and the friendly wallaby that came up to me and let me pet him. He was soft like a rabbit not coarse and rough like the kangaroos we feed in Brisbane. There are so many varieties of all the strange Australian animals. Next stop was lunch at Beechworth Bakery. We both had the suggested meat pies. Clay ordered the steak as did the guide and I branched out to the potato & steak pie. Mine just had a mashed potato crust instead of pastry. Following the guide we put on tomato sauce (ketchup) and ate it like finger food. It was good. I think Australian tomato sauce is sweeter than ketchup. We shared a vanilla slice for dessert. We bought a small package of yo-yo biscuits to snack on later. While we were eating, the guide asked if we'd be interested in not visiting the winery since we'd been to one in Kangaroo Island and were scheduled to visit more tomorrow. He suggested a California Redwoods plantation that was planted in the 1930's and never harvested and is now preserved. We agreed it sounded cool. After lunch, we went to the restrooms and he went next door. He kept telling us it used to be a brewery. Now it is Innocent Bystander Cellar Door. Cellar Door is evidently the local term for a winery's tasting room. By the time we got back to the car to meet him, he had arranged a tasting for us there. He said it was a Yarra Valley winery equivalent to the one we were bypassing and this way we wouldn't really be giving anything up. It was a great compromise and we bought a small bottle of our favorite. Our favorite was a surprise, a rose Moscato with under 6% alcohol. We spent the next hour or so driving to the top of Mt. Donna Buang. If you climb the tower at the summit, on a clear day you can see Melbourne. So, of course we didn't see it! We stopped at a section of the Yarra Ranges National Park called the Rainforest Gallery for an elevated walk to a waterfall. Now it was time for the Redwoods. It was a really special spot and we were glad we got to see it. Last stop on the way back to Melbourne was in Warburton where we could stretch our legs by the Yarra River and use the toilets. On the way back, the guide offered to drop us at St. Kilda Pier where he had earlier suggested we spend sunset to view the little penguins come in for the night. It was about a 5-minute ride from the ship at the cruise terminal of Port Melbourne. We agreed and spent an hour or so waiting and then watching Little Penguins. It was a superior experience to the one we had near here in 2006 at Philip Island!

We got back to Sirena about 8pm and ate a quick dinner in Terrace. We have another early start tomorrow and it is past bedtime for me, so that's it. It was another good day.

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