Our Journey Around the World – Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Our Journey Around the World: Part 5 – Melbourne, Australia

We arrived in Melbourne and headed off to meet Karsyn and Ben. We didn’t have a vehicle and a nice man at the airport told us to just hop on this bus, get off at this stop and then we could walk to our condo. Although this man was nice, he was severely mistaken! We ended up hailing a cab from the bus stop (remember we also have our luggage with us) and it was another 15 minute cab ride from where we were! We got to the condo and headed upstairs where the lovely kids were waiting for us with a fridge stocked with all the goodies that two girls who just got off a plane and walked 6 blocks to a bus to have to hail a cab after, could want. We stayed up playing games and describing our adventures over the past week.

Now one thing that Carolyn desperately wanted to do was swim with the sharks. We walked up to the Aquarium and as a twist of fate, there was one spot available for the next morning!  Carolyn was flying high with excitement! However, the next morning she showed up, ready to go and achieve this dream she had had since she was a wee girl. She sat and sat and waited and waited until finally an employee showed up to deliver the news. The diver is sick. So, incredibly disappointed Carolyn had to walk away without her swim. The other side of this was that she was not meant to meet up with the group for another 5 hours and no one had their phones on.  She walked around Melbourne, checking out the sites, stopped for lunch and met some lovely people from all over the world! Meanwhile the rest of the gang sat around having lunch discussing if Carolyn had been eaten by a shark or not.

We also discovered the Escape Rooms! If you haven’t heard of these before, Escape Rooms are basically a problem solving team exercise. You go into the room and have to find your way out (hence: escape) within a certain period of time. We did pretty well during the first room where we had to escape from jail and had such a good time we thought, “Hey! Lets do that again!” This time we chose Transylvania Escape! The first part of this was one member of the team needed to get in a coffin which was to be closed and locked shut with chains. Carolyn volunteered for this delightful feat and went back to be locked inside a coffin – which was surprisingly comfortable.

So the gang starts the quest and they had to decipher a complex code that Albert Einstein himself would have had trouble with to unlock the chain on the coffin. Kari, Karsyn and Ben figured out all of the clues and got the correct code for the lock – but alas – the lock did not open. After a few more tries, they called in an employee who also tried the correct code. Still the lock would not open. Kari reassured Carolyn numerous times in the coffin letting her know, “Don’t worry, they will be here too with the lock cutter,” as Carolyn practiced her eternal dirt nap. 20 minutes later the lock cutter arrived and Carolyn was free!

This whole fiasco clearly shook all of us up as we could not figure out a single clue after that point.    

We also took another opportunity to get a bit more of a flying experience and headed out to a zip line course… which was quite a distance away and up a VERY steep hill. Online the zip lining course looked quite safe and not TOO high up so we thought we could handle it all quite well…. until we climbed up to the top. Ben, being the little monkey that he is, had no issue.  However, us girls to a little bit to get us moving off of certain obstacles. We made it through in tact, thank goodness, but the train ride home was just a time to sleep as we needed to rest after that life threatening experience.