Matt and Lisa's Adventures

26 December 2022

We had Christmas with the Kennedys in Lincoln. Lots of amazing food – thanks Gail! As with all Christmases, I ended up eating too much. Emily received a new bike from Santa and poor Phil had to run next to her while she biked and she wanted to do a LOT of biking. Lisa and I also went on a couple of rides with her – she is pretty fast for a kid! 

After spending the Christmas night at Alan and Gail’s we headed home on Boxing Day morning. We finished off the final packing and departed for the airport. It felt weird to leave knowing that it would be nearly a month until we returned. The international area at the airport wasn’t open yet and so we snuck into the domestic Koru lounge. By the time we headed to international there was a huge line and we spent what felt like an age waiting to get through customs and security. Once through we had a quick stop at the second Koru lounge of the day before boarding. The Air New Zealand flight was good and had a new entertainment system which was a big improvement. I watched The Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking which was quite good. 

After landing in Melbourne it took forever for our luggage to arrive. Lisa got very frustrated and it wasn’t a good selling point for Air New Zealand’s priority baggage service. We caught the Sky Bus into town and went to our hotel. There was a bar next door that appeared to be hosting a Goth festival based on the clientele – we didn’t go in there, it wouldn’t have been Lisa’s scene. The hotel was ok for one night – great location and reasonable price but old and small. 

After settling in we went for a walk to find dinner, but there wasn’t much open. We almost had a palaver, but thankfully we found Betty’s burgers which was pretty good. Lisa tricked me into walking past Myer and demanded to do some late night shopping, but I kept us to the plan – shopping is for tomorrow.

27 December 2022

Lisa had been frothing in anticipation of shopping in Melbourne today and she got the chance to do a lot of it. Melbourne was very hot getting up to 37 degrees and so we tried to spend the day in air-conditioned locations which meant we couldn’t do much site seeing. Lisa was very excited for Myer and Uniqlo – some might say excessively excited. While Lisa shopped, I wandered around. I spent an hour at Dymocks, nice to have a proper bookshop again and especially such a large and well stocked bookshop. Sadly for them, I just took photos of the books that I would then buy on my kindle. 

We had Schnitz for lunch and caught up for a milkshake at the end of the day. We then braved the walk back to the hotel and onto Southern Cross station in the extreme heat. We had planned to shower at the station but we had missed out on the closing time for the showers by about 10 minutes and so we had to shower at the airport which turned out to be much better as the bus had no air conditioning and was horribly hot. Lisa got worried about the guy in front of her on the bus as she could see his jersey, but thankfully the shirt said “Bape”. 

We had dinner at the airport but the options weren’t great. However, the cider tasted fantastic after such a hot day! 

Then it was onto the long flight. Lisa managed to get a few hours of sleep, but for the life of me, I couldn’t fall asleep which made for a very frustrating trip. I did watch A Quiet Place (good tension and interesting premise) and Operation Mincemeat (predictable but an easy, entertaining watch).