Start of a Melbourne fortnight

 By way of getting a bit organised on 2 November - and being focussed as the passerine broke wind on 3 November - we pulled out of our drive at 0655.  We got to Orbost by 0730 without seeing a single car going in our direction - and very few going the other way.  Overall there was very little traffic and we got to 505 in just over 6 hours, including a 15 minute stop at the Yarragon spud shop to grab a few interesting sauces as well as 10kg of Sebago.

Temperatures along the way had been interesting.  Very warm overnight so it was about 19C as we left home, rising to 21Cas we got to Genoa.  By Bairnsdale (0845ish) it was up to 29C.  However by the time we left the Latrobe Valley it was down to 22C where it stayed.  The apartment was also at 22C.

We went shopping in Prahran, making it across Fawner Park despite much of the grass being taken up by flannelled fools.  

We sat out in the Winter Garden with the louvres open, letting in a very pleasant breeze.

About 1730hrs I was struck by the almost monochrome light at Albert Park Lake towards the Port ... 

.. and noticed a Petri Dish leaving Station Pier.
Turns out it was the Disney Wonder,  which hold, 2,400 victims and 940 crew.  The tub is said - on Wikipedia - to have 850 'staterooms': no 'cabins' on a tub sponsored by Tinkerbelle and Mickey Mouse, no sir!  That works out to an average of 2.8 punters per cell, so there must be a lot of groups of 4!  Yecch.
We still had the louvres open when the air ambulance fired up at the Alfred.  Much much louder with them open!  Judging by the way it ripped up and banked into the turn to the East,someone needed him urgently!
The sun dropped below the building on the opposite side of St Kilda Rd.
After a short while a colourful patch appeared on the building.
We have never noticed this before but it seems to be a combination of open curtains/blinds and the position of the sun given a look through! 
Lights on the cranes...

... and prominent buildings in the CBD.
Early in next morning (4 November) Frances went to get her coffee and alerted me to a "pretty" ship arriving.  It was indeed about as attractive as a Cruise Boat can be.  The Pacific Explorer from P&O: it has 1,998 paying victims and 924 paid victims, and was arriving from Auckland.  Interestingly the wiki says it is to be 'decommissioned' in February 2025 after being launched in 1996, so write off the cost over 30 years.

While I was involved with the Tawny Frogmouth rescue a second P&O (Petri & Other) Dish turned up at Station Pier.  So that is 6000 passengers and 1800 crew trying to catch a tram into the CBD in peak hour this morning!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more