Greetings from Australia

Greetings from Australia! (The kangaroo photo came courtesy of the Melbourne Zoo).

Eleven hours after leaving Pienza, our plane took off from Rome.  Thirty-six hours later we arrived in Melbourne.  The luggage gorillas from Emirates Air trashed Carol’s bike case (her bike was OK).  Arguing with the baggage claim people added another two hours to the journey.  We were so jet lagged; we were more unconscious than tired.

Phillip and Cate Ryan are renting our house.  

Their parents John and Maureen...

very graciously put us up and put up with us and chauffeured us around the city to bike shops, mobile phone shops (for new SIM cards), electrical shops (for adapters so we could re-charge all our communications contraptions)…

...and finally to Southern Cross Train Station (so we could get out of town).

Torquay was our first destination.

It’s on the Southern Ocean.  Bet you didn’t know there was such a thing.  

Antartica is out there beyond the horizon!

Torquay bills itself as the surfing capital of the world .  

There are surfing beaches for beginners, for teens and their families, and for adults, and then there’s Bells Beach which is the former venue of world surfing championships and epicenter of Torquay surfing.

Torquay was also our launch point for traversing the Great Ocean Road and the Princess Highway…destination Adelaide.