Back to Melbourne
Trip Start
Aug 11, 2005
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Trip End
May 22, 2006
Melbourne,
Australia
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Thankfully, the water lying on the floor of the shower attracted the bugs' friends and family. There were about a half dozen in the puddles. Experience from Bermuda has helped us understand this...they're coming up from the drains. Gross.
To help out the next occupants in our room, we made sure to tell the front desk about our bug story. They seemed to be quite disgusted and apologized profusely, but certainly made no offer to refund any of our money and being the wimps that we are, we didn't ask for one. Stupid, stupid us.
We arrived back in Melbourne around 1pm. We had hoped to do the brewery tour of Carlton United, but when we called earlier, they were already booked up. Gerald thought we should check out the merchandise anyways as he's been looking for a Carlton Draft beer glass
01-West Gate Bridge
. Unfortunately, they didn't have one, but fortunately, three people were late for the tour and they took us along in their place. Excellent! In the end, the latecomers finally did make it, but the tour went ahead, just with one extra person.The tour was really interesting, as this was Australia's largest brewery in terms of volume of beer produced. Being on a Friday afternoon, the production lines were not working as their production for the week was complete. We still made the rounds of the brewery, seeing the malting area, the brewing vats, and the bottling line. At the end, we even were given samples of Carlton United's beers. The good thing about touring on a Friday is that we were given a bonus sample of beer, one more than we otherwise should have had. We had to turn it down as we couldn't return the rental car with the smell of beer on our breath, not to mention the troubles we would have breaking the law driving under the influence.
We made our way from Carlton United to Hertz. Here's a good story about a rip off. On paying the bill, Gerald noticed that it was about $75 more than we expected. He looked through the receipt carefully only to notice that there was an $8.50 per day charge for Tolls. Huh? On picking up the car, we were told that if we went on any toll highways or bridges that we were to call in and they would get added to our bill. Well, being the cheapskates that we are, we avoided them like the plague, which wasn't that hard really
02-Melbourne
. Gerald asked the guy why the charge was there."Oh, that's a blanket charge for the toll highways and bridges."
"But we didn't go on any tolls."
"You didn't?" he asked with a blank stare.
"No, so why is it on my bill?'
"Oh, we just do that for our customers as a convenience. They don't want to be bothered with calling in or worrying about the tolls, so we just add it to their bill for them."
Some convenience! How convenient to be charged $8.50 times eight! How thoughtful of them. Needless to say, they refunded that "convenience".
Tonight, we met up with April, one of our Irish friends that we met in Cambodia. All along, we knew that we'd be in Australia at the same time, so we've kept in touch hoping to meet up. It was fantastic seeing her again. Unreal how close you can feel to someone having spent an eight hour bus trip (five of which we spent broken down on the road) and three evenings out. We caught up and started to discuss our next destinations. Wouldn't you know it? She and her boyfriend Paul will also be in NZ in February. We'd all love to be able to meet up again. Too cool.
