6 April, 2017 – Arrival in Melbourne
We are graced by the arrival of our American good friends, Jan and Hugh, for around 3 weeks. Those loyal readers who have studied our past posts will have seen Jan & Hugh on our three tours with Andrew Villone Andrew Villone’s Tours. We have lined up a rather extensive tour with lots of activities in Melbourne and then South Australia. So please, all of you welcome Jan & Hugh to Australia.

We picked up our friends at MEL after a landing of an early morning Qantas flight – some 15+ hours of flying and over an hour transit at MEL before finally escaping where Julie collected them and called me to pick them up. Tons of luggage but manages to fit in the car, sort of.

A bit of rush hour traffic but not too bad and we invite them into Chateau Lara at Edgevale! In the mean time, we have dropped Julie off at work which was on the way back. J&H are very efficient in unloading their suitcases into the very small room where they are staying in our small house. They are in the room with 500+ bottles of wine and with innovation hang some items off of the wine bottles, I wish I had taken a photo of that. Any way, we discover that Hugh has requirements for a number of specialised exercise workouts which I had not been previously aware. This required several alterations to our plans but we worked it all in. The first alteration was today where Hugh wanted to go to a workout at Melbourne Central.

So I introduced J&H to MYKI and our public transport. A walk down Fitzwilliam and a tram to Glenferrie Station. I showed Hugh how to get to the train etc and we walked around Glenferrie Road for a while eventually leaving him to his own resources while Jan and I walked back to Lara for a rest.

New Zealand Wine Tasting
J&H had the good luck of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival being on while they were here, you can check my Melbournexx pages for past such events. In their case, I have booked them into 3 special events, the first of which is this evening. Jan & I had planned on taking a tram and a train to Richmond (Cremorne) where the tasting was at the Glass Haus inside. However, when we got to Glenferrie Station, the train line was totally disrupted, apparently Hugh experienced it too, so we took two trams and got there closer than if we had taken the train and well in time. In fact, they would not let us inside until all 4 had shown up.

Meanwhile, Julie had agreed to meet Hugh at Melbourne Central and guide him to the tasting. After initial difficulty in getting to where Hugh was, they set off. The weather was great so Julie said “let’s walk, it is only two blocks”. [I have just done some calculations via Whereis and discovered that it is approximately 5 KM for those two blocks. The term “only two blocks” featured regularly during their visit.] Anybody that tries to keep up with Julie’s walking is an absolute hero so Hugh must have done pretty well. In spite of all that, they arrived in a good time and we go in and are advised to select our seats and they are unreserved. There are two long tables and we pick seats, which is a good thing as it starts to fill up quite quickly.

Glass Haus Inside is an old warehouse that has been converted to a nursery and the plants have largely been pushed aside to add two long tables.

When everyone settles there is a speech by a New Zealand representative and then an introduction to our MC, a relatively new Master of Wine from New Zealand.

The structure of the meal was 4 wine glasses with pre-poured wines with each round.

The first course was New Zealand King Salmon, very nice.. There were 4 wines as can be seen. The first one (left), a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc had a rather strange flavour to me, but Hugh liked it. The second was a Rose, not the best I ever had but perhaps the best wine of the flight. The other courses:

There were two more flights of wines including the reds and a sticky at the end.

Then there was a dessert.

All in all an enjoyable night. The food from New Zealand was very good but we were a bit disappointed in the wines. Jan and Hugh did a great job staying awake after the long flight but all were glad for the Uber home and good night.