Australia 4

I woke up at around 4am on Sunday morning. Astrid and David followed shortly. The bigs slept until close to six.

Our first full day in Australia coincided with a huge street music festival in this area (one of the reasons finding a hotel had been difficult). The streets in the entire area were blocked to vehicle traffic and there were bands playing at various places along the beach and in the streets and nearby park. It's exactly the sort of thing we avoid like the plague ordinarily.

Sunday was our only day to get things done before David started the conference. We took the kids and the stroller and walked the four or five blocks up to the nearby grocery store. As I mentioned earlier, this was a pleasant surprise. The store was full of quality food and had many, many organic and gluten-free products. We filled both the basket and the seat of the stroller (I put Astrid on my back) knowing that all the places we stay while we're here will have kitchens, so buying things like salt, spices, honey and hot sauce makes sense. We'll just take these things with us to our next abode. For about $200 (the cost of a meal and drinks for two at one of the seaside restaurants) we bought good food for the five of us for at least three or four days.

After the grocery store run, we navigated the crowds and went down to the beach. It was crowded, but not crazy right on the beach. We picnicked, ran into a friend from Itasca and the kids played in the sand. On the way back to the flat, I lost the rest of the family in the crowd and was briefly lost with no purse, money or phone (all of that was with the stroller, which David was pushing). It was a strange feeling, but I quickly found my way and reunited with the family back at the flat.

The registration for the conference and a gathering at the home of the Itasca Melbourne consultants took place that evening. The kids held up remarkably well as we (probably irresponsibly) kept them out until nearly 9pm. Walking back home through the, by then, very loud and drunk music festival crowd, we got some strange looks. I'd have wondered what we were doing out there with three small children if I'd seen us, too.