Well, for the first time in 2 months we’re in a big city – and a confusing one at that! We bypassed Brisbane, so this will our first ‘real’ city since Sydney at the beginning of October. And it was a nightmare – the traffic was all over the place, especially after being used to straight, long country roads with nothing much on them. The worst thing about driving in Melbourne is the trams – to allow for them on many streets the right turn is called a “hook turn”, which means pulling over to the left while indicating right, and then waiting for the traffic lights to turn red, and then shooting across the junction suddenly. Sounds odd? Try doing it, in a campervan, with two children in the back shouting about the fact you’re a mad driver! After the second time, I wimped out, and took three lefts at the next junction rather than one right. But the nice side of Melbourne are the houses in the suburbs – full of cute, picture postcard cottages like the one in the picture. It gives the city a cosy feel which is absent from most big cities.

The reason that we are here is to meet Gloria and Michael, who arrive in Melbourne on Tuesday. They are expecting us to meet them at their hotel on Thursday, but we plan to surprise them at the airport at 6 o’clock tomorrow morning (something that we couldn’t say about here until they were on the plane). So there they’ll be – 26 hours on a plane, 3 hours in transit, arriving at 6am, which is really 7pm for them, and then they get ambushed by 2 grown ups and 2 hyper-excited girls. Confusion won’t be the word for it!