Meanwhile back at the ranch............. The next stage of our journey is New Zealand. We fly tomorrow (1st December) and meet up with Nan again in Rotorua. We will write again in this blog from over there. Hope you are all well. It is lovely to see your comments. Keep them coming.

We also got taken to a place called Soverign Hill in Ballarat which is a reconstruction of an old mining town. We panned for gold and got about 4 cents worth.

There was an old fashioned bowling alley with wooden balls and skittles. Bit harder work than Fakenham Superbowl.

Steve got stuck in cooking in the kitchen and helping get the flowers ready to sell .

We then hired a car and drove down to Melbourne (see Christmas tree picture) We met another friend called Claire who used to live in Norfolk. She took us to see where `Neighbours` is filmed and they were filming as we watched. Saw a few members of the cast. That was fun. Claire then took us to her parents place in the countryside near somewhere called Bendigo about 2/3 hours from Melbourne. They run a flower farm. Claire and her family are SO NICE. We had a great time.

They took us on an old fashioned paddle steamer and someone took this romantic picture of me and Steve!

Tony and Judy run a great cafe and work really hard. They managed to take a bit of time off to show us around. Steve and Tony went in for a sailing race, Em, Judy and myself worked hard walking round museums and drinking coffee.

Obviously we are encouraging responsible drinking and Em is only drinking a small bottle of beer!

This is when we visited Canberra and stayed with Tony and Judy. We went for a sunset walk and saw `heaps of roos`(learning the Aussie lingo). Beautiful.

This picture is in wrong order, but I don`t know how to move it.
We met Nan in Melbourne. She is also travelling around OZ and NZ. It feels really strange to see Christmas trees and decorations when it`s sunny.