Melbourne - Day One

We took a side trip to Melbourne for the long Easter weekend. Both Good Friday and Easter Monday are holidays here so the girls had off from school and Brian had off from work. We flew down Friday morning and flew back Sunday evening. We decided to take two days to explore Melbourne and then use our middle day to drive down along the Great Ocean Road.

We quickly discovered that people take Good Friday very seriously. The refrain of the day became, "Open daily except Good Friday and Christmas Day." We found stores and museums shuttered and even the free tourist tram was not running. Apparently employers have to pay workers time and a half to stay open on public holidays so 9 out of 10 restaurants chose not to operate. 

We found a great (and busy!) cafe that was open for breakfast and then set out to explore the city by foot. The oldest part of Melbourne city center is quite compact so it lends itself to walking. European settlement of the city dates back to just 1835. Many of the elaborate buildings such as Flinders Street Station below were built in the boom that came after the discovery of gold in 1851. 

The Melbourne skyline displays an eclectic mix of new and old with a healthy dose of contemporary outdoor sculptures and street art. 

Melbourne is considered the cultural capital of Australia and boasts many old theaters. It is one of six UNESCO cities of literature and was also rated the world's most livable city in both 2011 and 2012. Source I suspect I would thoroughly enjoy living in Melbourne. Still, it's hard not to compare it to Sydney and find it fall short. It really is hard to top the beauty of Sydney's harbor. 

Melbourne boasts a lot of wonderful parks and we explored many of them.

Here are the girls near the big flower clock.

At the end of the day we drove an hour South of Melbourne to spend the night in the city of Geelong. We chose this spot because it got us closer to the coast and gave us a start on our day of driving the ocean road. We were surprised to see how quickly things tapered off once we drove out of Melbourne. Instead of the sprawling suburbs of Sydney I felt we drove into relative obscurity quite quickly. When you look at a map of Australia it looks like this.

However, this map of the population density of Australia paints a clearer picture. The vast majority of the county remains open and largely unpopulated. 

On a global scale, this sort of emptiness is akin to the Sahara Desert, Northern Canada, Russia and just a few other places. We have yet to head into the dry hot middle of the country but we have ventured far enough North (to Port Douglas) and South (to Victoria) to understand that the density of Sydney is the outlier.