Gallivanting with Grandma

Phew. How busy have we been lately? You'll have noticed the rather large gap between blogs. Sorry about that. I'll try to do a few over the next few days to catch us up with each other.

We spent most of the last month having far far too much fun doing touristy things with Vicky's mum.

First of all we headed down the Mornington Peninsula to stay at St Andrew's Beach where there was plenty of appropriately beachy type activity. A real highlight was a tour we did of the bay in a little boat looking for seals and dolphins. Grandma donned a wetsuit and got up close to the seals. She did pretty well as a novice snorkler to manage to hang on to the back of the boat and see stuff!

Following the nature/water theme, we had another great evening in the city harbour on a penguin tour. There is a colony of 'little penguins' which has taken up residence on a man made breakwater off St Kilda Pier, and by going out on a sunset cruise we got the chance to see them all coming in from a day's fishing, zooming round the baot underwater, and clambering up the rocks to find their nests. They were most cute.

Then Vicky & her Mum headed off for a relaxing girls' weekend away to the red centre of Australia - Uluru. It rained for the first time in 5 months when we were there so some of the activities we planned to do weren't possible, but we had one wonderful sunny day when we did a walk near the rock in the morning and went on a tour of the nearby Olga rock formations in the afternoon. And lots of time for chatting and chilling out.

Finally, you can't be a Brit in Melbourne without visiting Ramsay Street. Yes, we are far more serious about Neighbours than the locals and the bus that takes you to the residential street where they film is full of UK citizens. We got to walk around the street, go to the set of the garage & greasemonkeys, and meet one of the cast. Unfortunately I (Vicky) haven't actually watched Neighbours for a while so the chap we got to meet ("Fraser") was a mystery to me, but my Mum seemed pretty happy to get her arms round him.

All too soon it was time to wave V's mum off again at the airport. Sadly her journey home was a bit eventful, with a bout of food posioning necessititating a short stay in a Singapore hospital en route.