Visiting Melbourne

Thanks to Phil's parents and some dear friends, Phil and I were able to enjoy some quality time together without kids, in Melbourne. There was lots of quilt admiring, of course.And we thoroughly enjoyed Melbourne's cafe and restaurant culture, consuming a rather large number of coffees, and eating out everday... We walked the centre of Melbourne inside out and back to front (pretty much spent three days walking, hobbling back to the hotel at night when we could barely take another step).Oh, and to save carrying our own bulky camera everywhere we took one with which we were rather unfamiliar. You can probably tell. Looking at the above photo, I was thinking we'd stumbled on achieving the clever tilt-shift thingy my sister does (I think she had to buy an expensive doodad, and take a workshop to do it) until I realised I smudged the lens somewhere along the way, and the rest of the photos all had that artistic looking blur over half of the image...
Other highlights included the Look! exhibition at the State Library - lot's of original artwork from children's books, including many books in our own collection - as well as an exhibition of the original artwork for Graeme Base's The Waterhole.
We spent a day clothes and shoe shopping (we had a significant list which we managed to achieve) and another day exploring Fitzroy (Brunswick St, and Smith St) where there were so many interesting little shops and cafes.

My favourite thing about Melbourne, though, was sleeping for 11 hours, uninterrupted! I don't think that's happened since somewhere in the '90s. We're usually doing well if we manage six in between kiddie toilet stops or kiddie nightmares or baby bottles or alarm clocks.