We spent another lovely week exploring Melbourne and enjoying time with our friends. We started the week off with a trip into the city to go up to the Melbourne Skydeck and grab a delicious meal in Chinatown. The views from the top of the sky deck were quite impressive!

On Tuesday, January 27, the state of Victoria (including Melbourne) experienced record-breaking temperatures up to 50 degrees C (122F) with our area reaching about 44/45C. It was hot! Luckily our little apartment stayed nice and cool. Our friends came over and the kids had a great time playing games.

The next day it was considerably cooler, and Hannah, Charlotte and I headed into the city to Federation Square where we spent some time visiting the NGV Australia museum, the world’s first major gallery dedicated exclusively to Australian art. From there, we walked through Hosier Lane to admire the street art and then took a short walk around the gardens before grabbing a treat and heading back to Camberwell for sushi as a family. Another really nice day!

The following day we took the tram down to St Kilda beach to check out the area and ride the old wooden roller coaster at Luna Park Amusement Park. We loved smelling the salt air and marvelled at the big, beautiful sandy beach they have so close to the city centre, but were disappointed that the roller coaster was not operating. So we skipped the amusement park and headed back to our apartment.

On Friday of that week, the 5th grade took a field trip! LOL Which means that Luisa and I had some nice one-on-one time at the Melbourne Zoo. The zoo is very well done–plenty of space for the animals (sometimes they were hard to spot!), the animals all appeared very well cared for and there were plenty of misters and water areas to combat the heat. And it was hot! One of those sneaky California days that starts out overcast but quickly burns off. And the Australian sun is no joke! But we stayed out of the sun, ate plenty of ice cream and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

While we were enjoying the zoo and the other girls were doing their schoolwork, Steffen was living his best life at the semifinals of the Australian Open. He watched Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev battle it out and came home sooooo happy!

For our final day in Melbourne, we spent the day exploring a bit outside of the city with our friends. It really was a delight to spend so much time with this lovely, funny, smart, caring family. A real highlight of the trip so far! We went to a winery, had a delicious lunch in Yarra Glen at Harper and Ivy Cafe, got some playtime in at a fabulous playground/park and finished the day at Yarra Valley Chocolaterie & Ice Creamery where we bought an obscene amount of chocolate to get us through our upcoming long drives.

And just like that, two weeks flew by! We really enjoyed our time in Melbourne and were not quite ready to leave. But alas, it was time to say goodbye and embark on the next leg of our Australian adventure–a 35 day, 4500+ km road trip, mostly along the southern coast but also through the Nullarbor Plain, a vast, arid, and largely treeless limestone landscape, eventually arriving in Perth. We are very excited to see so much of this beautiful, diverse country.