Our last day of our stay in Melbourne. Pretty much free and easy for the day, and after four days of rain, the weather was decent and sun out for good parts of the morning too. Our activities were planned around key timings: specifically that our hotel checkout had to be before 1100hrs, the SkyBus Hotel Transfer to Southern Cross Station would be at 1500hrs, and the Emirates flight home would be at 1800hrs.
Breakfast was at an early 0800hrs and at Muleta’s Cafe, a little eatery just 4 minutes walk from our hotel, along Queen Street and directly opposite Queen Victoria Market. The cafe has a pretty wide menu with several pages of beverage. Ling was tempted to try their pancakes/waffles, which – according to the cafe’s billboard has been well-received by diners – but we decided to start with just the “Everybody Loves Benny” eggs benedict, and a “Mr. Big” which comprised of the usual hashbrows, scrambled eggs, bacon, grilled mushrooms, and sourdough bread. Which with hindsight was the right decision – because the portions that came were huge. The four of us had a lot of problems finishing the pile of food.
Breakfast, a return to the hotel to finish packing and a quick check-out done, we returned to QV Market with several hours to burn. There are hundreds of makeshift stalls in the Market selling a variety of apparel, footwear, leather goods, souvenirs, little household items and the like – not counting the fresh produce, condiments and neighboring deli opposite. I reckon that visitors could easily spend 3-4 hours going from stall to stall, and best of luck resisting spending small dollars buying little items! We fought hard the temptation to spend small dollars, but still left with a couple of shoulder bags and several household decoration items.
Just opposite our hotel and along William Street is Flagstaff Gardens, with a decent-sized children’s playground. Ever since our SkyBus Hotel Transfer bus drove past this park, Hannah has been pining for a visit to it – and she finally got her wish on our last day. The kids certainly enjoyed this one, with the swing clearly one of Hannah’s favorite highlights of this vacation.
Our luggage inbound was fairly modest with a normal size 26″ case, and a smaller 22″ case which contained mostly Peter’s diapers. We probably ended up using just 3/4s of the diapers, which posed problems – alongside all the Tim Tams and presents we’d bought, we now had a problem fitting everything back into those two cases. We were pretty tempted to buy an additional 28″ case just to buy all the interesting knick knacks and little household decoration items at QV Market!
We were still feeling royally stuffed from the huge breakfast at Muleta’s, so made do with a light lunch back at Queen’s Kitchen. And we’re off back to the airport in 30 minutes. Next post back home in Singapore and some retrospection of our trip.:)
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