Melbourne Trip and Kangaroo Island

I am sorry I haven’t been able to update my blog recently, but it is difficult to find time to sit down and publish my thoughts.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit Melbourne and see the Australian Open. For those of you who don’t know, the Australian Open is one of the 4 biggest tournaments played every year and consequently, all the biggest names in tennis attend.

I went to Melbourne with a group of friends named John, Kim, and Sarah and left by car on Janurary 22nd late at night. It wasn’t my choice to leave so late and drive all the way to Melbourne (9 hours), but my friends wanted to get an early start… I don’t know if any of you have had the chance to drive on the opposite side of the rode, but I can tell you it is quite tricky. It wasn’t the driving on the left that was bad, but it was the fact that the steering wheel was on the right that made it difficult! I had a tendency to drift left while on the rode and was close to the curb a few times. No worries though, we got there safe and sound at 7 am in the morning.

As expected, we were all exhausted and slept for most of the morning. We spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the city of Melbourne and just taking a look around. For those of you who want to see pictures, I have already posted them on facebook. We went to bed pretty early, because we had a big day ahead of us. The next day (Saturday) we spent the whole day watching tennis. I mean the whole day… 11am to 12pm. I won’t get into details about the matches since many of you do not care for the sport.

Note: I am getting tired…so there won’t be much detail from here on out…

On Sunday, I spent the morning and afternoon exploring Melbourne some more. We visited the Victoria Market (huge outdoor/indoor market that sells food, clothing…etc.) and the Melbourne Museum which was awesome. I enjoyed how it was a general museum and had exhibits in all kinds of areas; dinosaurs, wildlife, human body, science. The best part about the museum was that there was no art! I hate art museums (Sorry Leslie and Aaron).

Note: I am getting really tired so I will do the rest in bullet format.

- Sunday night we watched more tennis including the number three player in the world Novak Djokovic. The match lasted till 2:30 in the morning and I only got 1 hour of sleep
- The level of tennis was amazing and I had a blast
- We left Melbourne at 6:30 in the morning but I couldn’t get any sleep on the plane because the guy next to me was this pot head who wouldn’t stop talking about his druggie travels in San Francisco. It was okay though because we didn’t have school because of Australia Day (the forth of July but for Australia).

The next weekend our Cal Poly group took a trip to Kangaroo Island which is about 2 hours away from Adelaide.

- The Island was very beautiful and Katy and other naturalists out there would have enjoyed it very much
- I got to see Australian Seals which are VERY endangered.
- I got to see wild koalas up close along with some wallabies
- We saw very nice scenery like the “Remarkable Rocks” (see pictures)
- It was pretty cool overall, but it was a long day. 6:30am – 10:30pm

Hopefully you enjoyed this post and didn’t mind my bullet point format. This weekend I am traveling to Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Hopefully it will be a fun trip…there are suppose to be great beaches along with amazing rainforests in the area. There is one more thing I would like to add… this past week in Adelaide we had 7 straight days of over 104 degrees… I’d like to see Stephanie handle that.