Melbourne Day 143 8/02/2015

After a leisurely start and breakfast at the local cafe we set off north towards the highway and then west to Melbourne. We both felt a bit disappointed that we've not had more time here in Bright to do more walking and maybe even get out on a bike. However we cant do everything and we've covered a lot in a short time. The drive north west passes through picturesque high pastures, cattle farms and vineyards before reaching the highway. The temperature reached 38 degrees as we joined the highway. The drive to Melbourne took c2 hours by which time the temperature had dropped to 21 degrees. We were heading south east of the city to visit Richard and his family, Diane's ex boss from earlier days at RBS. We had planned to stop in St Kilda, a famous suburb of  Melbourne, on route however there was an annual festival on and the traffic was chaos so we continued south and stopped at Brighton Beach and Denby Beach (the one of the well known colourful beach huts) before continuing on to Hampton where Richard lives with his wife, Louise and their kids, Billy, Henry and Daisy. The family moved here 4.5 years ago and certainly seemed to have settled in very well and enjoying the life style here. We had a lovely meal and caught up on lots of things before setting off to the airport to drop off the hire car, which showed we had done over 1900 kms in the week, and check in at the now familiar Ibis Budget Hotel for the evening. We popped over to the airport to take advantage of the free wifi before returning and sorting our bags for our 7.15am flight to Auckland tomorrow. It's hard to believe we've been here for 6 weeks and whilst we're sad to be leaving Oz we're both very excited about visiting New Zealand - the next leg of our adventure!