Roller Coaster Ride Down Under: March 2013

Saturday, 30 March 2013

Melbourne to visit the Easter Bunny

Thought we'd take advantage of the 4 day long weekend over Easter to finally explore a bit more of Australia. Our destination: Melbourne along with a short trip down Great Ocean Road to visit the Twelve Apostles and a few other sites. Also we were fortunate to spend some quality time with Jaime's Mama and Mami while in the city.

Armed with some travel tips from Reena's stay along with a friend who had recently visited Melbourne we had a good list of things to check out while we were there.

Overall, Melbourne is a lot like Montreal, artsy, stylish and sort of hippy-ish. The weather is cooler than Sydney. There are loads of restaurants, coffee shops and things to see and do. The city has a free tourist tram that does a loop of the CBD, and there is also a tour bus that is free to visitors. The city has a series of alleyways with interesting restaurants and shops.

We really enjoyed spending time with Mama/Mami/Jagrutiben and Dipen, it was fun catching up as well as getting to know each other better. The trip down Great Ocean Road was a fun drive, full of twisties with a really scenic view the entire time. On the way down to see the Twelve Apostles we stopped off in the city of Lorne, did a bit of shopping in a store called "Ghandu" and continued on down the windy road. When we returned we checked out St. Kilda, this turned out to be my favourite part of Melbourne. The last day was spent walking around Ackland Street and by having a Kugelhuph at Monarch Bakery.

Below are some pics from the weekend.

Kugelhaupf

Sunday, 24 March 2013

Blackberry Launch

Below are some pics from the Blackberry Z10 launch activities that happened here last week. They also refreshed the office with some new vinyl!

Thorsten even made it down under to present at the event

Weekend in the Gong

Spent this past weekend in Woollongong, partly to attend a birthday party and partly for an impromptu weekend getaway out of the city. All week I was hoping for good weather so we could ride down. Fortunately all those Hanuman Chalisa's came in handy and the Sun God was listening:) Weather was fantastic!

Best part of the ride down is the option to ride through Royal National Park and do a stretch of the Grand Pacific Drive. Royal National Park is about 40 min to an hour south of where we live and is a set of twisties that curve through various altitudes in a forest like setting, ending off at Sea Cliff Bridge and on to Grand Pacific Drive along the coastline which is just a gorgeous drive. A few pictures below.

We were staying in a Bed and Breakfast that we booked less than 12 hours before leaving. The place was fairly nice and was perfect for what we needed. We headed out to Jayanti uncle's 50th Birthday party in Corrimal later in the evening. The party was great, good food and good company. Luckily we had met a lot of the people at the party before from either Navratri or the Diwali party last year. Unfortunately my memory is crap and I couldn't put a name to a face for the first half of the night. Most people are friendly so that definetly took the edge off being in a good full of people who seemed to know who we were through a family member or people from back home.

The following day we carved back along the road and stopped off at the Sri Venkateswara temple in Helensburgh, which was one of the nicest temples we've been too. It was so large and well kept. They also served food at modest prices that provided our masala fix for the day.

We ended the day with a scorching 35 degree plus cruise back into the city. The last 10-15min of which I spent wondering how far I could get with the low fuel light on. I'm new to this particular bike and was really pushing my luck, and being a newbie to the city had no idea where to pull off to get gas. Lucikily made it home without having to push it back.