Melbourne - base camp

Cool morning breeze and big smiling face of Pras welcomed us at the Tullamarine airport. With all the anxiety about immigration and customs (since we had food items in our baggage) clearance, this was probably the least fussy officials that I have met. Or may be it is the Friday morning effect, already in a weekend mood :) Honestly, my first trip to the United States had a similar zip through experience with the immigration officials on a Friday early morning.

Getting all the luggage into Pras' car was an optimization problem. When we started from India, we didnt realise we were carrying so much. In fact, at the airport check-in counter, we were upset that we were way short of our free baggage allowance.

The next anxiety was the car seat, whether Varsha would be throw tantrums. We did not take much risk and handed over her favorite "Baba" rhyme video on my Nokia Lumia.

Traffic and freeways reminded me of US101 from SFO to Mountain View, apart from the side of the road on which we were driving. Melbourne was probably emptier than any other place that I had visited.

Truganina - that is where we were heading towards. A calm western suburb near Hopper's Crossing (that is the nearest railway head. Not that we would go by train anywhere on this trip, just some geography gyaan). Neatly arranged rows of individual houses with wide driveway, alongside a dried creek, the MI6 special agent number 007 was our destination!

There starts our wonderful leisurely 2 week vacation with our fabulous hosts P-P-P.

Some not so exciting things we did
- Emptied the suitcase full of eatables, Indian delicacies, which would be remind our hosts about us months after we leave
- Getting out of jet-lag
- Get accustomed to the warm/cool/cold/windy/chilly weather as the temperatures changed as if playing on a slide
- A telephonic interview for a US based job opportunity. Well that was exciting. More about it some other time. But in the context of this vacation, it was a distraction.
- Some shopping and repacking the bags for the long weekend trip. Of course, I will blog about that next!

Check out about the trip to Great Ocean Road here!

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