In Melbourne for a week

Then it was time to go to the boat - the Spirit of Tasmania which was taking us back to Melbourne and mainland Australia - the end of our time in Tassie! We had enjoyed our time here so it was with mixed emotions that we were leaving. But it was really good to go back to Melbourne and the exciting and somewhat uncertain times that lay ahead.

This was going to be our third different bed in a row since leaving Taroona, and the kids had been really good with that. Especially Annabelle who last year was quite sensitive to different environments on our trip to Europe was not having any problems. As long as she had a bed to sleep in she was fine!

We got a good dose of Melbourne traffic - people in Hobart joke about its rush hour which is from five pm until 5:05 (in reality it's a bit worse than that), but Hobart traffic is a breeze compared to Melbourne. We arrived on Tuesday June 3 at 7am, and there had been an accident outbound on the South Eastern Freeway, so it took us til past 9 o’clock to get to Doris' parents house - more than double what it should take.

Doris' parents extended their wonderful hospitality once again - the two spare rooms became our bedrooms and we took over the garage with all of our stuff from the cars. It felt really good being in Melbourne again, and Christopher and Annabelle were immediately very comfortable at Doris' parents place. Christopher of course remembered Ong Ngoai and Ba Ngoai (granddad and grandma) really well, and Annabelle made it her home immediately too: we're still not sure whether she liked it there for them or for the Dja Dja (which is what she calls Cha Lua - a traditional cooked Vietnamese pork sausage roll we all love). Even weeks later in Venice she threw a tantrum wanting to go 'home' to Ong Ngoai and Ba Ngoai's house for Dja Dja...

We had a week in Melbourne, which was spent finalising things for our three months in Europe and catching up with friends, some of whom we hadn't seen since we moved to Hobart. Before we knew it was Tuesday June 10, and we were ready to fly to Amsterdam. Dad took us to the airport and we were ready to board the 'big plane' as Annabelle put it: she had just started putting words together.