March, 25th

Melbourne

It wasn't until the early morning hours that the storm started to calm down. The sun was shining again and the thermometer rose to 25 degrees Celsius. We borrowed Garry's mother's car and at the nearest station we took a train into Melbourne. Although this is a very modern and busy city it kept its own flair due to the numerous old and quaint buildings.

The downtown area is not too big, we were able to explore most of it by foot. Melbourne has a very good public transportations system, which helps to avoid traffic jams and parking problems. And in downtown Melbourne you can hop on one of the cable cars for free - a service that is used not only by tourists.

After running around for some time we finally came across the only store that sells aviation maps and bought the three maps that we still needed for travelling to Sydney. At a newspaper stand I find a German paper called "Die Woche in Australien' (The Week in Australia) whose readers are Germans, Swiss and Austrians living in Australia. I will call them up tomorrow and offer them to run a story about us.

While reading the paper on the trainride back to Garrys house, I finally get some idea of what is going on in the world outside Australia. The Australian newspapers don't seem to be too interested in the rest of the world, except maybe for the attacks in Kosovo.

A visit at a Telstra phone store, which is our local phone provider, enables us to quickly check our website. Everything on our site is up to date and the English version works so well that some of our hosts had been quite amazed. We would like to give a big 'thumbs-up" to our webmaster Dirk and to Dominique in New York. What really made us happy is the fact that the magic mark of 3.000 visitors has been exceeded. Playing around with numbers - here's another one: we have been in the air now for approximately 36 hours. Now we just have to figure out the exact mileage.