Melbourne moving

 The decision to acquire generated some stress in our lives: some of it expected but with a few bonuses.

  • The first bonus was the amount of time it took for the vendor's conveyancing people to add the title for the second storage cage to the contract.  Possibly a week more than Gary (the agent) had expected.  However he kept up up to date and kept assuring us that the vendor regarded the sale as firm.  It happened.
  • The second bonus - quite a small one, perhaps a Christmas Tip to a building janitor, rather than the sort of thing Finance and IT companies pay out to their CO - was that the conveyancers we had been planning to use were very unhelpful.  However Gary suggested a firm of lawyers who could do the work: they have been very good.
  • The monster bonus - Gina class- turned out to be getting the funding sorted.  This was a matter of selling some funds through our financial advisers.  The advisers themselves tried fairly hard but the people in the database/system unit were, as they always are, obstructive and idle.  Eventually got that sorted, albeit with a fair dummy spit by me (with Frances holding my coat).
So we had a settlement date and an AirBnB apartment to stay in for a few days while sorting out things in Melbourne and headed off.

A pleasant bit en-route was buying diesel at an Ampol place in Bairnsdale.  Sticker price was not too bad: then we knocked off 5c a litre for being members of RACV and 4c a litre as we had spent money at a Woolworths: both expected.  Then the dude said we had $10 savings in our Woolies account so took that off as well.

Frances took over driving after that so I took a few snaps.  I was pleased to capture an image of the empty road behind us!
The road in front was a little busier than normal.
Finally got a good shot of a welcome to village sign in Wellington Shire.  A friend has gone feral about the xenophobia evident in the middle of everywhere slogon!
I reckon this guy is heading for Mount Bawbaw.

Somewhere near Orbost a shoe had been lying in the road and I didn't dodge it, so it rattled under the car.  That became an issue at Rosedale where someone passed us and pointed down.  Frances was driving at the time and took the hint, pulling over.  The trim on the back door was wobbling in the breeze (again).  Fortunately I had watched the guy at Belconnen Mazda punch it on a previous occasion so knew the fix.

I got back behind the wheel and had the pleasure of driving through Traralgon.  This totals 10km according to Google Earth: of this 3km is ribbon development before the town and 4 km more ribbon shite after the town.  As good as the other enema-insertion points of Wagga and Nowra in NSW.

I then started to get interested in what the sat-nav (Google Maps - GM) was telling us.  It seemed to be saying that with 100 km to go we did a further 70 km on the M1 and then turned off, taking a further 30 km across the city to get to St Kilda Rd..  This made no sense - I expected to turn off at Toorak Rd and drive about 5 -10 km across the 'burbs.  So I stopped and looked at the route.  It all looked pretty normal so off we went again expecting to find a diversion somewhere.  In fact all that happened was GM had decided a bend in the road needed to be talked about and we pressed on.

This took us through the centre of Toorak (at 40kph for some time).  Given the rich reputation of the area it was still amusing to find at one point we had a top-end Porsche in front of us, while passing a parked Lamborghini.  We found the place to pick up the keys to our AirBnB (about 400m North of the apartment we are buying) and set up camp.

Food was a small issue so after taking a drink we headed off to an IGA at 19 Commercial Rd (about 600m away just going on where I knew there to be an IGA.  This turned into about 1.2km where GM marked 19 Commercial Rd South Yarra.  We looked at the IGA I knew about and reckoned it was more a convenience store than a supermarket so pressed on to the place GM suggested.  We got to Chapel St without finding it so turned, taking a few photos as we came.
Chapel St.

This would seem to be our local wine shop.
There seemed to be a few 'interesting' commercial places along Commercial Rd.  Amongst the commodities being negotiated was, almost certainly, affection.  We didn't get into that but did acquire a couple of MREs at a Foodary - and they were quite tasty.

So after watching a little more Olympics off to bed.

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