Tag Archives: St. Kilda

Lovely By The Seaside at St. Kilda In Spring

The throngs are yet to arrive — it’s only Spring y’know — but several dozen people were sprinkled up and down the beach and boardwalk at St. Kilda Beach this week. We’re lucky to live in such a pretty place, but I’ve lived in seaside towns in the USA and the UK and there certainly was a familiar feel to our stroll along the boardwalk. In spite of the whipping wind, the smallest bit of sun appears and off come the shirts, out comes the lily-white skin, and up go the refreshed signs from the local council telling folks what they are and are not allowed to do on the beach.

The sparsely populated St. Kilda beach and boardwalk on a sunny Spring day in Melbourne, Australia

Spring sunbathers at St. Kilda beach in Melbourne, Australia

Sand sculpture of a shark at St. Kilda beach in Melbourne, Australia

Woman on a bike at St. Kilda beach in Melbourne, Australia with her Jack Russell dog sitting in the front basket

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No dogs allowed on the beach at St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia, during the 5 months of high tourist season

Thieves In The Night in Melbourne, Australia

If I seem a bit off my game for the next week, it’s because I am dealing with a very stressful situation right now. We’ve been burgled.

Sometime between Saturday night and early Sunday morning, someone broke into our garage and stole 2 of the 4 bikes in there — the most expensive ones — the customised Specialized road bike and mountain bike that Mark is out and about on several days each week. Not only that, they got all of the peripheral gear like the heart rate monitors, the bike repair kit, the brand new high-vis lights, the brand new pannier frame that only was installed this past week, and in Mark’s cycling bag was a digital camera which was also stolen. To add insult to injury, they left their ratty old bikes outside our garage as they rode away on Mark’s lovely bikes.

Mark and one of his STOLEN Specialized bikes

We are feeling quite gutted. The police came out from the St. Kilda Police Station to take fingerprints and they were lovely to deal with both in person and on the phone. But the likelihood of ever seeing these items again is quite slim.

Now I have to troll backward through YEARS of online receipts and paper receipts and pictures to find enough evidence to PROVE to the insurance company that we actually owned all of this. So my entire week may be getting eaten up with this ridiculous nonsense. It’s hard to feel happy about returning to Australia when we have to go through things like this and it came out of both of our mouths yesterday. We forgot to lock our car doors in Moyon or St. Martin de Brehal or St. Girons quite a few times when we were living in France for several years. Nothing ever got touched. But we return to Australia and within weeks back here we are burgled???

More soon-ish…

Walking On Water in Melbourne, Australia

Photos of the day are from the St. Kilda Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, Australia. This funny statue almost always has a seagull perched on the umbrella that the sculpted man is holding — probably because the ocean is a mere few blocks away!

We might be living in the heart of a large city now, but lovely and historical parks such as this one are a wonderful visual break from all of the shoulder to shoulder buildings. We are also quite lucky because this particular one is less than a 5 minute walk from our house and we stroll through it almost every day.

A charming metal sculpture carrying an umbrella and ‘walking on water’ in front of the glass conservatory at the St. Kilda Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, Australia

Charming metal sculpture ‘walking on water’ with a seagull perched on his umbrella

Quick Pics From A Melbourne Vintage Saturday

Quick pics today since I am listing, listing, listing on Ebay this weekend. Wheeeee!!! Things are already starting to sell. (whew!)

We took a little time for a quick wander through the once-a-month Vintage Clothing Market at the St. Kilda RSL Club (Retired Servicemen’s League for you non-Aussie readers). It was well attended, but it was also a blast from the past to see items of clothing that were clones of things I wore back in the 70s!

This hat seller below was doing quite a good business since we still have weeks of winter ahead.

Hat seller at the Vintage Clothing Market in St. Kilda, Melbourne

Shoppers at the St. Kilda Vintage Clothing Market in Melbourne

More soon…

St. Kilda Bound in Melbourne, Australia

Quick catch-up because we are about to have a wildly busy week. We are moving into a new apartment on Wednesday and the shippers are coming to deliver all of the household items that arrived via shipping container from Europe last week. Whew!

It took several weeks of looking for an appropriately-sized apartment to rent and we had one extra requirement that most people don’t have — we needed a lock-up garage to safely store all of Mark’s work tools. Let’s be truthful, that’s practically impossible to find in the extremely popular inner Melbourne area that we were looking in! But I was persistent and finally found not only a groovy apartment with polished hardwood floors and LOADS of closets in a 1950s era apartment, but it also had the wish-list garage AND it was on the top floor so there is NO noise from neighbours walking around overhead. Hooray!!!

Livingroom

Sunny bedroom

Tiny 1950s kitchen with original cabinets!

The kitchen is going to need a LOT of refinement because it’s teeny-tiny and actually has all of the original 1950s upper and lower cabinets in place along with a grotty and very small refrigerator, but we’ll get there. Thank heavens we brought our brand new and energy efficient refrigerator with us from France. And we have the agent’s permission to make ‘refinements’ to the kitchen.

All in all, we’re just happy and grateful to have found 90% of what we were looking for — and we are in our first-choice neighbourhood with trams on our doorstep, good shopping nearby, the inner city is a mere 10 minutes by tram, and the beach is around the corner. Again — hooray!

More soon (I hope!).

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey