Melbourne Day 1

09/10/19

Today I’m off to Melbourne for nine days and the main reason is to see the Harry Potter plays!!

We ended up with an Air New Zealand Skycouch, so me sleeping, and Luke watching Paw Patrol

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the official sequels to the books / movies. JK Rowling said she would never write any more Harry Potter books and instead she decided that the next chapter would be a set of two plays instead of novels. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is only available in Melbourne near us, so to Australia it is.

On Saturday the 12th of October the whole family was up early up at 5-30am for a quick breakfast to drive to the airport. I had arranged for a car-park near the outside of the terminal so it was quick and easy to pop across to the airport and check-in. Being a Saturday there was no traffic which was nice. Robin as he has done since he was little was pushing the trolley for us, and he was so pleased he could finally see over the top of the bags!. There was no drama’s checking in, so by 7.45am we were sitting at our gate with 30 minutes to boarding.

The flight went well and the boys loved having their own screens so they watch movies and play games as they wish.

Arriving into Melbourne also went easily, with small queue’s and just a small wait for our bags before I picked up the rental car from Avis, and they have kindly upgraded me several model’s so I had a nice new Kia Cerato with only several thousand KM’s on it plus plenty of space and semi-autonomous driving in which it follows the speed of the car in front which makes cruising on Australian long highways roads nice and simple as all I need to do is steer the car.

I will be staying at a friend’s house, Luke who has been very generous in letting all of us to stay in his house and let us have free range with his kitchen – which is great as this makes the whole trip possible as going to Melbourne was not in the budget for the year but not paying for accommodation has made it possible - thanks Luke!

And of course this is not Luke my son, but what I will now call big Luke. As you can imagine over the next week big Luke kept turning around when I was calling my son Luke, and when I actually wanted to speak to big Luke he ignored because he then thought I was talking to little Luke, all very confusing but fun.

We arrived at Luke’s place, and then popped down the road to a nearby Cole’s supermarket – this is a holiday where we will be doing our own meals to bring down the costs.

Big Luke’s has a great large house, and the boys enjoyed playing with his daughter Sophia, especially hide and seek which became all the rage when she was around.

Julianne spent the afternoon resting as she had been working up to 8pm last night and had had a busy week at work, so I took the boys to a nearby park and playground to explore, playing on slides and such while looking at the nearby unusual Australian wildlife.

Good thing Julianne is not around to see Luke getting close to the water.