Thursday, October 29, Mom and I booked a last minute trip to Melbourne--I'm so glad we went though I was grumpy while booking it. Sorry, Mom! I'm not always great about trip planning.

The only flight we could catch left early in the morning so we walked up to Kings Cross at 6a. It felt safe with a few people getting an early start on their work day and new arrivals from Dublin on holiday, sleepily walking up the street to their hotels. We took a budget airline, Virgin Blue, so ti was only carry-ons for us, a backpack for me and a little rolling case for Mom. It was great to the laptop behind for a few days.

Arriving in Melbourne we discovered that the good weather foolowed us--in fact it must have been at least 30C! Mom rented a manual car because that was all that was available and she knows how drive them. I don't. It was...exciting sometimes. Mom hadn't driven a manual in a while. Over the four days we had the occasional stalling, rolling backwards just a tiny bit on hills, and forgetting an intersection was a roundabout. But! We had no accidents or near accidentss, and Mom only turned into the wrong lane once the entire time. She did a great job! All of this is to say we didn't spend any time in the city because managing city driving on top of a manual and driving on the other side of the road would have been too much.

We used our early arrival as an opportunity to visit the Melbourne Zoo before heading to Ballarat. If you're gluten free, your best options are either to bring your own lunch or eat at the sit down cafe. None of the other food places inside the zoo cater much to gluten free diets. The sit down cafe has a few items that are clearly marke don the menu. I was starving so we ate lunch before noon, and the cafe was still serving breakfast. I had a tasty omelette.

It was just us and about 50 million school groups at the zoo that day. It was big enough that we weren't tripping over the groups all day but small enough that we could explore a lot of it without my foot hurting. Most of the animal homes are fairly large and well-landscaped to imitate their natural habitats. The Australian animal area is neat since the kangaroos can roam freely in the area. Since we visited them after noon, they were all laying down, napping in the shade--I can't blame them. It was so hot that if I was wearing a fur coat, I'd be doing the same thing. The wombats were sleeping (they're nocturnal), but the exhibit has a dark room with a view of their sleeping holes. So cute! My favorite Australian animals at the zoo were the echidnas. They look like cross between a hedgehog and an anteater. It was all I could do to resist picking it up for a cuddle. We did see a koala, or rather, a koala butt. It was not interested in people at that hour.

All the school kids were staring raptly at the elephants in the Asian area, but Mom and I were equally enchanted by the tiny ducklings that called the elephant's pond home. There were little fuzzy puffs of black and red. It was baby season at the zoo. In the monkey are we saw a baby monkey that had only been born the month before. The parents are all black with white fur around their eyes, but the baby is all white for the first couple months. We saw orangutans and gorillas. They were mostly busy eating and grooming each other.

Two of our favorite exhibits were the large butterfly and bird enclosures. The butterflies were everywhere. You needed to be careful when exiting that one didn't hitch a ride on you. They were mostly variations of black and orange butterflies, though we caught a glimpse of a large one with an iridescent blue body.

The bird enclosure was so large that it included three habitats : tropical, woodlands, and a more arid section. Most people tromped straight through barely stopping to look, but Mom and I easily spent more than an hour watching, sort of playing a variation of "Where's Waldo", trying to spot all the birds on the signs. I think we found them all except the large emu-like bird that Jon and I saw at the Alice Springs Desert Park. Some favorites include the pink crested cockatoo, red and green parrots, blue egrets, and some duck-billed bird that's rare.

By then we were wilting from the heat pretty badly, so we headed to Ballarat. There were lots of rolling green hills, pastures, and freshly shorn sheep--quintessential pastoral with an Australian touch: gum trees and koalo and kangaroo crossing signs. Somehow koala crossing signs are infinitely cuter than deer crossing signs in the States.

We had a terrible time finding our hotel; there are multiple Comfort Inns in Ballarat. Ours turned out to be near Sovereign Hill, not the downtown. After the trauma of navigating many roundabouts, hills, and stop-and-go traffic, neither of us had any urge to get back in the car to find dinner. Mom took a walk around in the late afternoon and discovered an Italian - Indian - Thai restaurant (Restaurante Da Uday). Crazy. The Indian curries were all gluten free. Needless to say we ate there every day, unfashionably early around 6p. Not the very best Indian food I've ever had but tasty, not too expensive, and near the hotel. Plus, Mom had never had Indian food in a restaurant before--she's eaten quite a bit because of my school friend Swati's family but that's all homecooked (and better, of course).

An exciting start to our Melbourne trip.

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