Traveling around Australia is great fun, no doubt about it. One of the best sides of it is traveling on remote roads, experiencing nature and enjoying the space while you are out there. It all changes dramatically once you get to the big city. Melbourne is one of them, and it’s no fun when towing a caravan. It took us quite a while to cross the urbanic landscapes of suburbia, and funnily enough we had to cross to the other side of the city to get to a caravan park. Obviously, these parks won’t be located in the center of town, so you are prone to have to travel a fair bit away from the CBD. Having said that, we definitely enjoyed some of the ride, as we crossed the beaches of St Kilda along the bay and we spotted the Spirit of Tasmania – the ferry we’re about to catch in a couple of days, docking at the wharf at Port Melbourne. It was very exciting to drive past the city and marvel at the skyscrapers that offer an impressive modern city views. Eventually, we ended up at a packed caravan park and figured this is really awkward to hang around so many people after three weeks on the road, mostly in isolated places and cute little towns.

The following day we went to visit old friends of ours who moved from Sydney to Melbourne about four years ago. Unfortunately they live on the other side of town, which means we needed to cross it again… To our surprise, we got stuck in a traffic jam on bloody Sunday morning. Eventually when we finally made it, it was really great to catch up and see the kids transitioning from a very shy start to becoming best friends hours later. Early evening we got back to the caravan park (no traffic jam thankfully!) to get ready for an early start tomorrow morning – we’re going to catch the ferry to Tasmania. Since it’s prohibited to bring in any fruit or vegetables, we cooked them all for dinner, made sandwiches and packed up whatever we could before bedtime.

It’s the last day of February and we wake up super excited at five o’clock in the morning, with anticipation to go onboard “Our Red Ship” as the kids call it. We left the park at six to make it to the harbour at seven and go through an endless check-in process, until we finally made our way through the long queue and literally drove into the ship with our caravan – pretty amazing! We parked in our allocated spot and went upstairs to hang around the passenger deck, with glimpses of “Love Boat” episodes. In the next nine hours we watched movies in a real-size cinema, spent time at the kid’s playroom, ran up and down the hallways, and had a nap in our tiny cabin. The sun was shining all afternoon and gave us some beautiful wide blue ocean views all around us to the horizon and back. We finally arrived back to shore, for our first ever visit to Tassie. It’s one of those moments you’re really waiting for, and all of a sudden, it’s right there in front of you.