Day 24 - Melbourne - Dec 18th

After a much better sleep, but with the Princess tickly cough as a reminder of smokers past, I let Paula get up to watch the sail in.  (Shouldn’t that be cruise in?)  At breakfast we met a really nice Canadian guy who was ex-Canadian Navy.  I think his team won trivia yesterday.

We ambled off the ship and joined the long queue at the dockside store to buy tram tickets.  After queuing for about ten minutes and just after paying, the shopkeeper announced that he had run out of tickets.  With a couple of thousand cruisers plus staff appearing, I suspect this guy wasn’t in the scouts.

Fortunately, the tram staff just told people to pile in and pay at the other end!  A touch of Tokyo here as we really did pile in for the ride to town. The locals waiting on the platforms en route were less than impressed.  We hopped off the tram a bit too early and walked along Collins St into town, then Bourke St, but passed a succession of closed shops!   Whoops.  We thought that maybe we’d made a big mistake, but as we approached the mall, there were hundreds of parents with small children, queuing up to look at the animated window displays in Myers.  The shops opened at 10am! 

I was beginning to fade after the long walk but once again, Gloria Jeans coffee was my saviour.  What we didn’t know until we wandered out was that we were in Mid City mall (I think...) with the clock tower in the centre.  A walk around then to the free circle tram.  Since our last visit to Melbourne, the loop has been extended to Harbourside.  We didn’t get off but stayed on back to the City and caught the tram back to the port.  Next time maybe.

We wandered around locally for a few minutes but it was a bit breezy and overcast so we headed back to the ship.  At least the shoe inserts worked well!

We watched as hundreds of locals queued for ages for the car ferry to Tasmania and as Colin & Jude (keen caravaners) were around, we thought that maybe the last pic might be them.  From my inexperienced perspective, it seemed a very slow loading system compared to the France/UK/Belgium cross channel ferries.

Just a snack in the buffet then we realised that every show and even the MUTS movie was a repeat.  Even the crosswords and the daily Sudoku and the TV films were repeats! So, after a coffee in the atrium we crashed early and read. (I’d bought a $5 book written by Humphrey Lyttleton, a well know Brit jazz trumpeter, band leader and programme  presenter, so at least I had something decent to read).

Just one sea day tomorrow before hitting Tasmania – a first for us.