Almost Home

This is likely my final Australia travel blog. Maybe I'll wrap it up a day or two later but who knows. Right now we're sitting at LAX waiting for our Continental flight to IAH. We checked our bags in Melbourne Friday morning at 9. We went and had some breakfast, checked in thru customs & immigration, security and waited. We boarded and departed Friday around noon Melbourne time. We flew thru the day, all night and arrived here at LAX four hours before we left Melbourne, go figure. Something about passing the international date line. You fly for 15 hours and arrive before you left. My body is totally weirded out. We won't catch up to ourselves time wise until we're on the way home to Houston sometime around noon. Talk about daylight savings time! Lord willing we arrive in Houston around 5 p.m. Friday after some 24 hours of travel just 5 hours after we left Melbourne. Weird to say the least.

Our final day of travel in Australia was a leisurely trip east of Melbourne to the Yarra Valley region. It's apparently wine country, sort of like California. We drove up Dandenong Mountain and looked out over Melbourne on one side and down thru the Yarra valley region on the other. It was certainly the kind of beauty only God could do. We had lunch in a quaint little Mountainside town, walked through some of the shops, bought a couple of items and then headed towards the valley. On the way were dozens and dozens of nurseries, farms growing veggies and plants and things. Would have loved to have bought a truck load of stuff but you can't bring that kind of stuff back to the US. Their version of wine country was gorgeous. Not that we're all that interested in wineries but it was an enjoyable trip. They are certainly serious about it and it showed. We toured one of the most beautiful and oldest wineries/hotels/B&B's starting somewhere in the early 1800's. We drove out across one of the biggest too. Then it was back thru Kilsyth where we had stayed to pick up our bags, load them in the car, to spend the night right by the airport so we could be there pretty early for the trip home.

It was the beginning of Footy in Australia. They are bonkers for Australian rules football. "The Footy Show" previewing Footy season came on Thursday night and was really interesting. No one could talk about anything else but footy. Its an interesting and fascinating phenomenon I don't quite understand but its strictly Australian and unique to say the least. Round 1, as they called it, was Thursday night. Everyone in the hotel dining room and bar was gathered around the Tele to watch the opening game between West Coast and St. Kilda. West Coast won. The scoring is weird but they all loved it.

Well, we're trying to stay awake here, while our bodies say, go to sleep. Think I better walk about, as they say in Austalia. Oh yeah, we're not there anymore. Going for a walk now. More blogging later. Thanks again for reading.

Only 1 worry now mates, will Todd be there to pick us up at the airport?

From the good ole USA, d & k