To Sydney via the spare rooms of friends and rellies

So to cut a long story short, we made it to Sydney and managed to meet up with lots of friends and rellies on the way.

It was like a dream to arrive at Jo's house (Steve's sister) – a whole proper bed, not an airbed – and we caught up on some much needed sleep while enjoying lounging around watching the tennis and seeing the sights of Stawell. It has a lot of facilites for a small town – hospital (where Jo works), two supermarkets, gym, swimming pool, even a lookout point with views to the Grampians.

Very greedy lizard in the Grampians

The top of the hill with Steve's sister Jo

We went on a bit of a fitness binge, inspired by Jo who's into triathlons. I did step aerobics (very unco-ordinatedly), we played tennis, went for a swim and enjoyed a walk in the Grampians, the towering granite and sandstone pinnacles you can see from the town. At the top three cheeky lizards binged on pieces of cheese and banana we fed them til they looked a bit sick!

Jo hits a winner

From Stawell we headed back to Melbourne to stay with Colin and Jacqui who have a lovely house in Williamstown within a short walk of a city beach. We all got a bit carried away with Singstar and stayed up til 4.30am with some truly awful renditions of Abba songs. I hope the neighbours had earplugs! After that we had almost no energy left for the rest of the weekend. We ambled around town with Jasmine the labrador behaving badly, ate fish and chips and Colin and Steve hand-made sausages which were actually pretty tasty.

Colin and Steve in the sausage making factory

Colin and Jacqui in a marina in Williamstown, Melbourne, at sunset.

Our next stop was one of Australia's top tourist attractions, the Penguin Parade on Philip Island, where Little Penguins come in from the ocean after dark. This necessitated a drive right through Melbourne to the far side of the bay. We made it even more painful by driving in circles around Melbourne for about an hour trying to avoid paying the toll on the freeway.

The Penguin Parade is probably the most touristy thing we've done in Australia, with an astonishing number of Japanese tourists and an enormous shop selling penguin themed everything. Steve was in fridge magnet heaven! The main thing you notice at the parade is the cold, with a biting wind off the Antarctic Ocean, even on a hot summer's day, so wrap up warm if you go. The low number of penguins on the day we went was a little disappointing but you do get to see them up close and personal on the boardwalk behind the beach which is cool.
The weather in Victoria was really hotting up with plus 40 forecast for 4 days in a row. Luckily for us we were on our way eastwards to Sydney just at the right time.

The long drive was made longer when we came across a bush fire on our route and were forced to divert, but we made it to Wodonga for the evening where we met up with Michael (a friend from CBH in Perth), his wife and her brother. They took us to a “club” that has no UK equivalent as far as I know. It was enormous with a self-service buffet restaurant, bars, performance rooms and about 200 “pokies” or one-armed bandits to the rest of the world. We let the bright lights and funny noises fool us into feeding them for a while but made a lucky escape before we gambled away the car!

Steve, Sal and Mike in Wodonga

That night was exceptionally hot and we couldn't sleep until well after midnight when it finally got down to about 30 degrees. But it was our last night on the airbed because after a long, boring drive up the Hume Highway we eventually made it to Sydney and my brother Sam's place that evening.

Nectarines for sale on the Hume Highway. Peaches and apples not yet available!

Once in Sydney we were totally focused on selling the car and tramped the city sticking up posters in hostels. I walked all the way from Coogee to Bondi in the process – a lovely coastal walk around rocky inlets, sandy beaches and lovely clear blue water. Selling the car proved to be a bit more tricky than we thought as the WA plates meant the new buyer would have to go through the annoying and costly process of re-registering the car in NSW if they didn't have an address in WA. We hoped for a backpacker driving west but in the end found a buyer pretty quickly who was willing to take on the re-registration after we discounted a bit: we bought the car for $3000 and re-sold it for $1900 – not so bad in the end.

Sam and Steve enjoying the weather of a Sydney summer's day

After the car sale was out of the way we started having some fun and had a night out catching up with old friends from the UK Ann-Marie and Alex, then two beach days with Sam's mates. Could get used to the whole Sydney lifestyle thing, but we're FINALLY off to NZ on Tuesday, it's the end of an era, and a very long way from Bristol, let's hope we like it ;-)

The Manly ferries in Sydney