Wednesday, 12 April, 2017
Since we haven’t been doing much over the first several days of their visit (??), it was time to get really busy. So our first stop of the day is the Old Melbourne Gaol (Jail for those of American background).
We were going to do this originally on Monday but our good friend Peter Fewster, who is a tour guide for the Gaol was not working that day but was today.
We have some discussion with Peter and have an informal look around before the tour begins.
[As an aside, you will note the initials PoME. This stands for Prisoner of Mother England. English people are known unkindly in Australia as Poms or Pommies. One theory of the nickname is the PoME above. The other is that all Englishmen have mottled red complexions i.e. look like a pomegranate.]
After this we went to a tour of the Police Watch House which is attached to the Gaol. In this tour there is an actor/actress who plays the part of the Sergeant welcoming the new prisoners, us, into the watch house. They did not allow many photos but here are some.
With Jan’s Dody Goodman look, hands-up how many know to what I am referring, she would not have been allowed to keep those shoelaces since they were considered contraband as prisoners might have hung themselves. Imagine the ignominy of hanging yourself with pink shoelaces! So we finally escape from the Watch House. The following are scans from an informative visitors guide for the Melbourne Gaol.
Note that the area marked as 2 in the above is the Gallows where Ned Kelly met his end that we showed in an earlier picture. Any way, we decided we had “done enough time” so decided to go have some chow, literally. We go to Melbourne Central, at which Hugh has had a lot of experience already with the exercise classes, actually to its extension being the Emporium, to our favourite Dumpling place, New Shanghai.
New Shanghai dumpling place in the Emporium
So after that quiet (?) start to the day, we return for a bit of a rest before the real action starts! Later that afternoon we head out to public transport again, but this time up Edgevale Road to catch the 109 tram which goes directly to our destination.
We had planned to go look at Crown Casino, where I had spent an enormous amount of time before it opened 20 years ago, after dinner. But as we were early, and I had misjudged the starting time of the next event and it was on the way, so we went into Crown now. I am conscious of not taking many photos inside so we did not take any until we got into the retail mall after going through all the Pokies, Tables, etc.
We then walk around to our major destination for the afternoon – the pick-up for the Melbourne Tram Car restaurant. We meet Julie there and wait for our trams to arrive, which are older style trams done up as a restaurant inside.
We had met the owner of these tramcar restaurants several years ago and asked him about the food quality. Basically, he said that it was a restricted environment and they could not do raging gourmet. Thus it appeared that our choices were frozen foods heated up in a microwave, beef or chicken.
Our tram journey takes us through the streets in South Melbourne and we end up in Acland Street, St Kilda – a bit disappointing as we were here yesterday. I had hoped that we had been going to traverse new parts of Melbourne. Apparently the dinner ride would have taken us through the City before heading down to St Kilda.
In any case, we are eventually dropped off at Tram stop 125 from whence we commenced. Pretty good really, decent amount of wine and drink. Glad we did it, I am not sure that there is anything else like that in the world, readers may want to comment.
I had decided that since we were no longer going to Crown that we should go to another high rise to get a view of Melbourne – the Rialto Tower. However, I got overruled without a vote that we would go to the Eureka Tower which is currently the tallest in Melbourne. I was very grumpy because it was a long walk whereas Rialto was right on the 109 tram line. It cost us a bit of coin to go up Eureka and the most popular part was booked out. I guess the view was worth it (??) but any way, there we were.
After a pretty eventful day we return home for the predictable crash.