family & food

Naomi's parents just flew back to the US, after a two-week visit. It was great having them here. We got to show them some pieces of the city we knew, and go exploring with them.

The last post talked about our Great Ocean Road/Grampians roadtrip. Here are the four mighty explorers, posing in front of the Twelve Apostles:


Emboldened by the success of that trip, last weekend we took a day trip up into the Yarra Valley for some wine tasting. Colin was driving, and so made use of the elegant spitting buckets at the vineyards (he got more comfortable doing it after he saw the technique illustrated by a sophisticated-sounding British wine-sophisticate with a sophisticated scarf).

The weather was a little cool and rainy. But it was all very pretty. Along these lines:


Our original ambitions had been to visit 4+ wineries. But we were hungry after the first 1.5, and so headed for lunch in a nearby town. We had pizza, followed by Toblerone cheesecake. This shows the cheesecake:


And this shows our feelings about the cheesecake:


Our last stop was a brewery, where we split a tasting paddle of beer. Several of them tasted like passionfruit. Colin had a machiatto (strictly for safety reasons).


Our final dinner was at a place called Rumi, which several people had recommended to us. It was a sort of modern Lebanese/Persian place. Intensely yummy. We got so wrapped up in dinner that we forgot to take pictures until the end. The end was two desserts. One was 'Persian fairy floss' - a sort of hand-made cotton candy, made out of sugar, flour and vanilla. It looked a bit like fiberglass or fur, but that didn't slow us down. The other was an almond milk pudding, with cherries and some sort of jam. You can see them here, along with a pot of rose petal tea:


The end
(of this post)

"The Bush"

To all you loyal readers, we apologize for the delay in posting. But, fear not as this will be an epic one.

Naomi's parents have been visiting for the past week. This gave us the opportunity (the excuse) to explore a bit out of the city. We made our first escape into "the bush" this past weekend, heading west along "The Great Ocean Road," then north into the Grampians mountains before heading back east through some gold rush towns on the way back to Melbourne.

1. The Great Ocean Road is basically what it sounds like - mostly a coastal road (with a bunch of great cliff-coast views) going through various little cute towns.

This is a view of 'Bells Beach' (near the town of Torquay), which is known for great surfing:

We saw a couple surfers, but they seemed half-hearted. The waves didn't seem very impressive, at least to die-hard surfers like ourselves.

This is the cute fishing town of Apollo Bay, where we spent the first night:

Going inland a bit from the coast, there is a lot of temperate rainforest, which includes fern gullies and waterfalls. We stopped at one of them, Erskine Falls:

Another unexpected, amazing thing we saw in one of the towns were...

...bunches of calla lilies growing wild, like weeds!

The best-known site on the Great Ocean Road is "The Twelve Apostles." These are rock formations jutting out of the water, along the coast. I don't think there were ever actually 12, but some have collapsed and now they're down to about 6 or so...


This part of the coast is also known for having had many shipwrecks (particularly of ships that came from England). This was the site of one. We're sure it's less beautiful if you're approaching it from the sea during a storm.



2. The Grampians. On the way heading straight north from the end of the Great Ocean Road, we could see our destination looming in the distance:



The town we stayed in, Halls Gap, is known for having kangaroos grazing on front lawns (at least according to our guide book). Behold: the guidebook didn't lie. We woke up to a bunch of 'roos grazing in the grass near our cabin (and walked by some at night on our way to dinner, in the dark!). Although they are in town, they still seemed on guard when they saw people coming to take a photo of them:


The Grampians also include some waterfalls as well as pretty views from above, looking at the landscape around:


They are also supposed to contain many varieties of wildflowers that are not found anywhere else in the world. I assumed these were some of them:

The Grampians are also significant to the Aboriginal people who have lived in the area - we visited an Aboriginal cultural center in Halls Gap explaining the significance of the land to the cultures. There were also numerous ancient rock art sites around the park, of which we visited one:


As one would expect, the history of the area in the past couple hundred years is tragic. The Europeans changed the landscape very quickly with logging and grazing animals (not to mention the introduction of non-native pests like foxes). So it's kind of hard to know what to feel about it all...

More to come.