Melbourne

We bought a relatively cheap airplane ticket to Melbourne.  It wasn't as cheap as a bus ticket but it took an hour and a half instead of 11 hours, so it was worth the splurge.  Once in Melbourne we checked into our hostel and asked a ton of Melbourne tourism related questions.  Hannah, the woman behind the counter was awesome and helped us make some decisions as well as telling us about living in Canada and turning 21 in NYC and other such things.  It was really fun talking with her.

Lunch was a sad affair of pb&j and slices of cheese dipped in our special NZ mustard.  We booked tours for the next two days and then finally headed into downtown at 3:30.  There is a free tourist bus that circles the city until 4:30 and we caught the last bus halfway through the tour.  It was a pleasant drive although not terribly informative and we got off at the end of the line close to the Melbourne city library.

We then spent a couple hours in the library surfing the web and trying to figure out what flight will be best for us to Cairns in a couple days as well as catching up on email and facebook.  Then we walked back through the city where we had dinner at the cafe in the hostel of veggie pasta and veggie lasagna for $7 and $10 respectively.

Right now we are listening to Safari Pete who is auctioning off tours throughout Australia.  He is really entertaining because he is very over the top.  He has gone as far as actually wearing a safari style button down jacket/shirt and bucket hat.  The tours he is auctioning off are a good deal but so far are in places we aren't visiting.

UPDATE: Safari Pete has a segment called "Money or the bag."  It's a little bit of trivia and the first person to get the answer correct gets the choice of either taking the money (AUD $2.10) or some mystery item in the bag.  Well Andy guessed correctly for one of the questions and chose the bag.  He won a bag of spaghetti, spaghetti sauce and a snack bag of something called Twisties cheese. Go Andy!

Tomorrow we are having $2 pancakes at the hostel then heading to Philip island to see the Penguin Parade. It's a full day tour with other stuff but that's what we are most excited about. Then Friday we are doing an all day tour down the great ocean road to the 12 apostles.  You should google it or tune back in a few days from now to see our pictures.