Last day on the big island. We packed up the camper for the last time this morning. We headed off to the Melbourne Zoo for the best part of the day after following “Lee’s” instructions and missing the last lane change just before the zoo and nearly wiping out a local we arrived safe and sound. The $2 bucks to park for most of the day surprised us.

Locking the camper for the last time!

The zoo was a good day out with all manner of animals on show to keep us interested. It was quite cold in the morning and we got a bit chilled until about 1PM when it really warmed up. There is quite a bit of development going on at the moment and a few of the exhibits were closed but there was still plenty to look at. We were, like the whole trip the odd ones out today, school groups, groups of women with babies and families dominated the people at the zoo.

Lemur

Monkey of some description

The Meercats had babies, way too cute!

All snuggled up on a cool morning.

This dude was very interested in Col’s almonds he was eating, can’t remember what it was.

He couldn’t bear it! (sorry)

I love Green Tree Frogs.

Very ugly Iguana!

Seriously YUK!!!!

This guy was as big as my hand.

Once we had done enough at the zoo we decided to head for Acland Street famous for it’s cake shops and eating establishments for a late lunch. We could not get “Lee” to navigate around the city centre so we took a gamble on a route around the outside and down Punt Road to St Kilda. Sharon navigating on the laptop with Oziexplorer maps. She had huge spatial problems as she could not turn the map around. We only had one small correction along the way but it took a good half an hour to go about 10Km. We parked in Marine Parade with the car pointing towards the boat and walked the short distance up to Acland St.

Cakes

and more cakes

We ended up having our lunch about 4PM, must be a record for us. We made it an early tea as well so we did not need to eat on the boat. Sharon sent an SMS to Jess just in case she was around and as luck would have it she was on a tram coming our way so we met up for a coffee and cake. Jess was going out for tea shortly after so passed on the cake. We left rather full and headed on down to the boat only a short drive away.

Security checks over with we sat in line for ages and in the end some one broke down or something in our lane and they moved us over to the other lane. Eventually we were on the boat and sailing out of Melbourne. A sad day for us as it is basically over now with only a short drive home tomorrow morning. We got a couple of glasses of bubbly and reminisced about some of the good times we have had and we tried to come up with our number one thing we did. Neither of us could narrow it down to any one thing, both of us had a few things we could not separate.

Driving up the ramp onto the boat

Good bye Melbourne

I am afraid it is back to reality next week. We have plenty of cleaning and servicing to do over the next few days. It may take years to get all the red dust out of everything. It has been a brilliant 3 months and it definitely was our trip of a life time (until we do the next one…..).