Melbourne Monday

Chuck wanted to work on his talk, so after coffee and croissant at Gloria Jean’s (the Aussie version of Starbucks), I went off to explore the city. First on my agenda was the Fitzroy gardens with the cottage that had belonged to Captain James Cook’s parents. This was where he was living when he set off to explore Australia.



It was a “3 bedroom” house. The bedrooms made the cells in the jail seem spacious. I was standing in the doorway to take this shot.




This was the first really nice spring day so all of Melbourne was walking around in shirt sleeves. I still had my jacket on. The flowers were in bloom and it was just lovely walking through the garden. I stopped at the Fairy Tree, which is a carved tree trunk.



Now I walked down Collins Street – this is more like Beverly Hills to me. Wandered and shopped until it was time to collect Chuck for lunch. Downtown Melbourne has a lot of Arcades, so it was fun to wander and look at the shops. I found a food court and took Chuck back to it. We had paninis for lunch and then went back to the room to wait for Moishi.

Chuck and Moishi had planned to work some on the talk and discuss some other business and I just went along with my knitting and a book, so that we didn’t have a hard time meeting up again. Moshi likes to show us things each time that we get together, so we had a tour of the casino and the observation platform on the highest building in Melbourne.

For dinner, we went to Becco, a very nice Italian place. I had carrot soup and quail stuffed ravioli with parsnips; Chuck had beef carpaccio and Linguine with sugo of olives and white anchovies and rare swordfish. For dessert we shared deep fried truffles stuffed with valhrona chocolate with orange crème anglaise.