Day 53: day in Melbourne

On our whole day in Melbourne we walked a couple of kilometres to the train. We ended up walking nearly nine kilometres this day. We actually did a lot of walking during April, during the month we walked an average of 4.4 kilometres a day, a couple of kilometres more than we usually walk, so walking a couple of ks to the train wasn't a big deal.

We've only been to Melbourne a few times in our lives. One of those times was during our honeymoon, where we also visited the MCG and Australian Sports Museum. I like to joke that I nearly lost David there last time! There's a tonne of information and if you're interested in sport and history you can easily spend hours there.

We left the caravan park early, leaving plenty of time for things to go wrong, but nothing did, so we ended up getting to the stadium way too early for the tour we were booked on. So we took a walk through the local area. Wikipedia says this about the area: 

It is considered to be Australia's "premier sports precinct" and regularly hosts some of the biggest domestic and international sporting events, including the AFL Grand Final (Australian rules football), Australian Open (tennis), and the Boxing Day Test (cricket). The venues have also previously hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

Rowing on the Yarra

It's clearly also an entertainment location. Taylor Swift performed at the MCG three times in February, each were sell-outs (96,000 people). The day we were there we saw lines of people (mostly young women) who had obviously spent part or all of the night waiting in line to get into a concert at another venue in the precinct. A security staff member told us it was a concert by former member of One Direction, Niall Horan.

Victorians love their sport and this precinct
is well equipped to handle tens of thousands
of people. There are several large train
stations nearby, not to mention trams.

We walked as far as the Yarra River and discovered another sporting event underway. It was a university rowing regatta.

We've watched cricket matches at the MCG many times in our lives. It was great to see it again in person, though it was all set up for AFL matches (they had three on that weekend, one each night).

The commentators have an amazing view (obviously).

This is an amazing tapestry made to celebrate the
150th anniversary of the MCG in 2003. It's
seven metres long and two metres high. Absolutely
stunning in its detail.

This is the distinctive suit Cathy wore
when she won the 400 m gold 
in Sydney.

After a 45 min tour of the stadium we gave ourselves over to exploring the huge Australian Sports Museum. It was wonderful. I discovered exhibits about Cathy Freeman, an Australian athlete who won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 in the 400 m. She's in the Australia Sport Hall of Fame. I've got a story about her that I don't think I've shared here—it's not exactly relevant to my everyday life. (This is my memory, I'm not sure how accurate it is.) She is practically the same age as me and in our last three years of high school we were attending schools in the same town. I was a little bit of an athlete at the time and represented our school in the 4x100 m. We ran in the same race for our schools, though I'm almost certain we weren't in the same leg. I wasn't the fastest at our school, so I think I was running second or third leg of the relay and she would have been their last runner. We had the Australian Junior Long Jump Champion in our team (my friend) who I'm pretty sure ran our last leg. I don't know which school won...it would be nice to think we did, but I suspect that Cathy outran everyone. She won gold and silver at the Commonwealth and Olympic Games in the next few years after all. Anyway, it's a fun story and I even got to tell it to one or two of the staff at the museum!

We decided to head home when we still had a little bit of energy to walk to the train and from the train to the caravan park. It was a fun day that we're glad we took the time do. Cricket, especially, is a shared interest of ours that we love to indulge in together. I think it's important to invest in these shared interests, especially as our years of investing daily in our boys are over ("daily" being the key word here, we're still part of their lives, just not so intensely).

The next day we really got going on our journey home. Over the next five days we drove about 1,600 km to get home, stopping along the way to take in a few sights. I'm going to condense those days into just three posts, so as not to prolong the end of this journey too much!