It's the eye of the tiger

Keen LesandCassinOz readers will recall that in March we decided to cycle three-quarters of the way around Port Phillip Bay in three days. We based our route off a bike ride called Around the Bay in a Day, which I declared "crazy" people here in Melbourne did once a year. We took it fairly easy, averaging maybe four or five hours a day, and although we were tired, it was nothing too strenuous. Well, we have decided to become crazy people.

Yes, Les and I are going to cycle all the way around Port Phillip Bay, a distance of some 210 km, in a day. Actually, the true Around the Bay in a Day ride is 250 km, but all 2000 places available for the ride are sold out. So we are going on a slightly shorter version, which has a shortcut (unfortunately, the shortcut cuts out easy breezy flat coastal riding and none of the hills). There are three versions of the 210-km ride, and one of those has already sold out as well. So that is at least 4000 riders in Melbourne who know they have what it takes to tackle this mammoth task, and the ride isn't until October. The ride costs $125 per rider (given to charity), so as soon as we have the money we are going to sign up for one of the 210-km options, provided that thousands more deranged Aussies haven't snapped up all the places by then.

This is quite a task, given that while we both cycle every day, neither of us goes very far. We've started going on long rides at weekends, two hours or more, to get used to long distances. Bicycle Victoria, which operates the ride, seems to think it is possible at this stage for people like us to train for this ride. If only we could just play some inspirational 80s music and do a few seconds of various exercises, and then it would be October and we'd be fit and ready.

The other big piece of news in our lives is that we are coming home for a visit. Leslie flies out tonight for Ireland, and I will be joining him on Saturday. He'll stay through July 11th, but I'm leaving on the 6th for New York and will be there for four days. We're very excited to see many of you soon. And I have learnt my lesson and will not wear every piece of clothing I own on the plane. It was not a smart way to fly. This time I will take as little luggage as possible and bring books and magazines on the plane, not more socks and boots. That is, if either of us actually gets to fly, given the current Qantas strikes.

It will be especially good for Leslie to have a vacation, I think. He's been working insanely hard this semester - up late most nights, working all weekend. He's come up with some fantastic photos for his assignments, and I'm going to put some of them up on the blog so you can see what he's been up to. But it'll be good for him to have a bit of a break - he only has to do three assignments while in Ireland. You all will see him much more than I have in the past few months.

Pop quiz, hot shot

I'm afraid we're not adventuring as much as we used to, so I apologise for the slowdown in blog posts. We haven't forgotten you, it's just that, well, how much do you really want to hear about Guitar Hero? And the new episode of House?

But I have been working on something for the past few weeks. We decided to have a pub quiz for Democrats Abroad Victoria. I was in charge of doing everything - booking the microphone from the pub, writing the questions, buying the prizes. Because I was the one to get the prizes, I got what I thought was most appropriate and best for the situation - $220 worth of American candy. It was awesome. I got Butterfingers, Mike and Ikes, Jolly Ranchers, Now and Laters, taffy, Baby Ruths, 3 Musketeers, Jelly Bellys, the list went on and on. The shop woman looked at me a little strangely as I went to pay for it all. It may not sound like much to you who have access to this stuff all the time, but over here in Oz these things are hard to come by. There's a candy shop in one of the malls in the city that carries it, so I took two of just about everything they had. The first prize was an enormous bag of candy, the second prize was a slightly smaller bag of candy, and the third prize was just a jug of beer.

I spent weeks working on the questions. My picture round was pictures of presidential pets, and teams had to identify which president owned which pet. I had originally cropped the pictures so that just the pet was in them, but Leslie said that was too hard. So I expanded them out again, so in some pictures the president or a member of the president's family was visible in the picture. I think this made it too easy, as many of the teams got all the questions right.

The trivia was due to start at 8pm, and by 7.45 no one was there except me and another committee member. I was really nervous that no one was going to come, and I'd have been so disappointed if no one had because I'd spent so much time (and money) preparing for the night. But it all worked out in the end - we had six teams, about 30 people. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I think the questions were not too hard nor too easy. We'll probably do another trivia night sometime soon.

It was a relief to have it over with, and a lot of fun on the night. It made me feel a great sense of accomplishment to have seen the entire project through.

In other news, we bought a car. It's a red Mitsubishi Lancer, and it seems fine. We bought it from some friends of ours who bought it 10 years ago, and a mechanic has recently replaced the clutch and declared it to be in perfect working order. Leslie drove it home from our friends' house today, and it seemed to drive fine. I was against having a car, as I fear that it will mean that we won't cycle as much, but it was getting ridiculous to expect Leslie to schlep all his gear on the tram.

He's very busy at the moment with school projects. He has a major fashion shoot assignment due soon, and he's shooting some of the images for that tomorrow. I think he likes the creativity of planning these big photo shoots, but it stresses him to have so much work to do. Still, it's good practice for the big bad world.

We also saw the latest Indiana Jones movie last night. I really liked it, I thought it was a rip-roaring good time. But Leslie said it was a disaster, it shouldn't have been made, it lost the heart of the original three. Take from that what you will.

From zero to hero in no time flat

A few weeks ago Les and I met up with some friends and went to an exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It sounds la-dee-dah, spending many hours at a museum, but it wasn't, quite.

The exhibition was called Game On, and it was an exhibition about the history of the video game. The bulk of it was made up of hundreds of playable free video games. The exhibition had everything from Pong and Frogger through Nintendo games like Donkey Kong and Mario World to arcade games like Pacman up to modern online role-playing games and the latest games for the Wii. It was a very crowded exhibition so it was hard to get at a lot of the games, but if you were patient, you could play whatever you wanted. We spent hours playing various arcade and video games. Neither Leslie nor I had TV or video games growing up, so while the exhibition didn't trigger feelings of nostalgia from our youths, it sparked a feeling of "Ha! Now we can play what the cool kids have always been playing!" Video games are still something of a novelty to both of us, so we were thrilled to be let loose in a giant centre filled with all the games we weren't allowed to have as children.

When we got hungry we left and went to a chocolate cafe. It's not a cafe that has prepackaged chocolate - it's a cafe that only serves chocolate. Chocolate bagels, chocolate pizza, chocolate fondue, chocolate cake, chocolate waffles and of course, seven or eight different kids of hot chocolate. Leslie got a bit of chocolate overload, but I was in choco-heaven.

I love being a grown-up. You can play video games and eat chocolate all day and no one can tell you not to.

The next day, inspired by the Game On exhibition, we bought a second-hand Play Station 2 and Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero is a video game where you play a plastic guitar (with buttons where the frets are and a plastic toggle instead of the soundboard to strum) along with popular rock songs on the screen. Each fret button is a different colour, and you the screen shows you what buttons are coming up.

Winter is coming up, so we figured now was a good time to invest in video games. Leslie brought out his Tomb Raider 1 game from Ireland and beat the game, and I'm having lots of fun rocking out to Guitar Hero. I'm not very good yet and still get booed off the stage sometimes, but it's a lot of fun.

It turns out that if you don't let your kids have TV or video games when they're children, they don't grow up to be adults who don't like TV or video games. We're getting really into both. We're reliving other people's childhoods.

Sorry that this post isn't about leaping off cliffs or going on exotic trips, but life can't be all action. Sometimes you just need to sit on the couch and pretend to play the guitar.

Around the bay (as far as Geelong) in three days

There is a 250km bike ride for crazy people in Melbourne called Around the Bay in a Day. It does exactly what it says on the tin - riders leave Melbourne at 5:30 am and cycle the entire way around Port Phillip Bay (the bay that Melbourne is on) in a single day.

We aren't as crazy or nearly as fit as those people, but we liked their style. The ride is mostly along the coast, and we figured the scenery would be beautiful. We thought we might be able to do the ride in four days, so we set out on Friday about noon for parts unknown.



That's the route the Round the Bay in a Day people follow, and we figured we would follow it, as people who are that serious about cycling are likely to suss out which roads are bike-friendly and avoid those that are sealed in mud.

We took it slow and steady the whole way, nothing crazy. The first day was definitely the hardest. Although we had been told the route was "pretty flat", that turned out to be untrue. Firstly, the difference between "pretty flat" and "absolutely as flat as a North Dubliner's accent" matters a great deal to a cyclist. The first 40 kms or so could accurately be described as "pretty flat," but there were some hills in there. The last bit was the hardest. There were two mountains - Mt Eliza and Mt Martha - that could not qualify as "pretty flat" in anyone's book. I put my bike in almost its lowest gear and crawled up the hills at a snail's pace. It was a consistent snail's pace, and I got a bit of rhythm going, but it was slow going. Leslie's muscles seized up on him halfway up both hills, and he had to stop and stretch before continuing. Coming down Mt Martha was exhilarating, though - the panorama of distant mountains and fields and streams was laid out in front of us as we flew down. When we got to our destination for the day, I was too exhausted to face the possibility of hopping on my bike for the 2kms or so into town for supper, happy instead to ring for a pizza to be delivered to our motel.

We faced a headwind for most of the first day as well, adding to the difficulty. The second day was fine and calm, though, and the route was much flatter. It was along the coast for most of the journey, and we got to take the ferry from Sorrento to Queenscliff, which provided a picturesque and pleasant break from cycling.

The only fly in the ointment was that Leslie got a flat tyre outside Sorrento, and he had to walk it into town and find a hardware shop to sell him a bicycle repair kit. I cycled ahead to try to get help, but the taxi company said it wouldn't take bikes. The guy at the hardware store said that if I could bring Leslie's wheel to him, he'd fix it. I cycled back out to get the wheel from Leslie, thinking to bring it into town, get it fixed and bring it back to him. But he'd already walked most of the way into town at that point, and I missed him somehow on the road. I ended up cycling all the way back to the previous town, then calling, finding out he was in Sorrento, and cycling all the way back. Oh well. It was a glorious day for a ride - sunny, warm but not hot, calm - and a beautiful route, and I didn't have to go too far in this mishap. Les was able to patch his tyre, and we were back on the road.

The tyres proved to be a problem after that, though. His were in rag order, covered in bald patches and very fragile. On the third day his back tyre got two more punctures, and it wasn't fit to cycle the 100 km or so back to Melbourne. To tell the truth, I wasn't fit for it either. We had cycled as far as Geelong, a suburb town about 70km from Melbourne, and the rest of the route was on a freeway. Freeways are not ideal for cycling anyway, and our muscles and bums were sore from three days in the saddle. We were happy enough to hop on a train in Geelong back to Melbourne.

But it was a great trip. Our second night we stayed in a grand old hotel from 1877 (called, in fact, The Grand Hotel) in a sleepy seaside town called Portarlington. How sleepy? We tried to get supper at 8:15 pm on a Saturday night and even the town's takeaway was closed. One restaurant gave us some food to take away, but it was closing in 15 minutes and would not let us eat in. A girl on a mobile phone asking her interlocutor to pick her up seemed to be dismayed by the town's lack of nightlife, too: "I'm stranded in Portarlington. I can't think of anything worse. Seriously, I cannot think of anything worse."

Either the girl lacked imagination or had led a charmed existence up until this point, because while Portarlington was no great shakes from a late-night culinary point of view, it had beautiful sea views and was a lovely and charming spot. And the bakery in town made lovely hot cross buns the following morning, for Easter.

Favourite road sign of the trip: Eel Race Road. I'm imagining someone taking bets on a bunch of eels swimming around a tank.

Most exploitative church sign of the trip: "It's good to say SORRY: Confess your sins and ye shall be healed." This was on an Aboriginal flag, clearly trying to cash in on the Rudd Government's recent historic apology to indigenous Australians and make people go to church.

While the scenery was lovely and the views often superb, you're going to have to take my word on it, for the most part. Leslie hauled around a heavy camera all around the bay, but he wasn't "inspired" to take pictures. Artists.

Just ticking along

Nothing to report really but we are planning on doing our cycle around the bay this Easter weekend, so should have some news when we get back.

Pop Goes The Question

Cassidy and I have become formally engaged. In a move befitting her independent nature Cassidy was the one who did the asking and I was the one who had the honour of accepting.

We went to Sydney last weekend to visit a friend of mine, Emma, and her husband, Damien. It was a brief visit. We were only in town for 36 hours or so and so we thought we should take in a few of the must-see sights including the Opera House. Our friends had a cooking class for 4 hours and so we were left to our own devices to walk through the city. We wandered down through the Botanic Gardens to the harbour and walked out along the peninsula of the park that lies opposite the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House in front of it. Although overcast, it was a beautifully warm day and we lay about on the grass taking in the view. Because of some typical Melbourne-Sydney rivalry we had only ever heard negative things about Sydney from our Melbournian neighbours but the reports were very misleading for Sydney is far from the bland corporate ghost town that had been described.

Having oh-so-casually worked an apparently hypothetical "what would you say if I asked you to marry me?" question into a conversation 20 minutes earlier and received an encouraging reply, Cassidy took the plunge and asked me if I would marry her. Of course I didn't have to think twice.

Cass was appalled to learn that her unorthodox proposal was not as iconoclastic as she'd thought when she learned that there was a sexist loophole in proposal etiquette "allowing" a woman to propose to a man during a leap year. She has gone to great lengths to research this tradition and is at pains to point out that this custom is only applicable on the leap year day, i.e. February 29.

Damien took a photograph of us shortly after in front of the Opera House, so I guess this is officially our engagement picture.

We're thrilled to make official what we've both known for a long time, that we want to spend the rest of our lives together.

FAQ

But aren't you guys married already?
No, that's just Dave being an idiot. However we did toy with this idea over a year ago so you could be excused for experiencing a slight sensation of deja vu.

Did Cassidy get down on one knee to propose?
No she did not. We were standing on some precarious rocks at the water's edge so to have knelt down would have been an unnecessary extension of the risk she was already taking. She did stand on a rock slightly lower than mine though.

When are you getting married?
We haven't thought that far ahead yet. We're still just excited to be engaged.

Was a ring given?
Neither party received a ring but that will be remedied later.

Is Cassidy merely getting engaged because she is in silent competition with her brother?
No she is not. We are very much in love and she is just happy that Brendan is happy.

I heart Melbourne

Tomorrow marks our one-year anniversary in Melbourne. It's been a busy year, an adventurous year, a very good year. I am, I would say, much happier and more secure than I was a year ago. Leslie's unwilling to compare years but says he's happy now.

I truly love Melbourne. I love the trees, the buildings, the people, the atmosphere, the diversity, the buzz, the location, the weather. I love my job, I'm making some good friends, and I love our apartment.

Here are some things I have learned in the last year:

What a huntsman spider looks like (big and ugly, and pretty scary when they're in your apartment block

What the words "arvo," "fair dinkum," "grouse" and "crook" mean ("afternoon", "genuine", "decent and hardworking" and "ill or sickly" in order)

When an Aussie asks you how you're traveling, he doesn't want to know the details of your commute. He's asking how you are

Complaining about the weather and real-estate prices is a human trait, even if you live in a place (like Melbourne) that has beautiful weather and prices that are not exorbitant

The MCG, Melbourne Cricket Ground, is where they play Aussie rules football. Go figure

Speaking of cricket, I have learned it is a looong game. But I now know the rules

Everything Americans say about Canadians and the Irish say about the Welsh, the Aussies say about the Kiwis

"He doesn't know me from a bar of soap" is a way better expression than "He doesn't know me from Adam"

One does not "root" for a team in Australia. This is a rude expression. One "barracks" for a team

George Bush isn't good enough to lick Kevin Rudd's boots, if Kevin Rudd wore boots, which I don't think he does

We're going to celebrate our one-year Melbourne anniversary by going to Sydney, funnily enough. We're going up there to visit Leslie's friend Emma for the weekend. We haven't yet made it to Sydney, so this will be a good chance to see the opera house and all those iconic images of Australia that we haven't visited. It should be a nice little break, but not nearly as adventurous as what we did a few weekends ago.

On Australia Day weekend (a three-day weekend) we went camping with a group of friends about 100km from Melbourne. Driving down (I had somehow managed to be the one driving) I was more than wary. My friends kept making allusions to horror movies, and I'm not good in the countryside at the best of times. I was fairly convinced, as we drove into the mountains in the pitch-black , that some sort of murderer was lurking in the darkness. We came upon a car with its bonnet up, clearly a car with some sort of car trouble. I sped by them. "I am not stopping this car for anyone or anything," I declared. I feel bad about it now, because they clearly needed help, but I was far too freaked out to stop, fearing it was a trap of some kind. I just have to think the RACV helped them out.

Once we got there I calmed a bit, though my role in the tent-pitching and fire-starting was mostly to hold a torch so my friends could see what they were doing as they worked. We sat around the campfire and chatted, and I was no longer afraid. Half a dozen curious kangaroos hopped around us, getting within a few feet and grazing on the grass in the clearing where our tents were pitched. We also saw two wombats, or maybe it was the same one - they're slow.

There were LOTS of bugs - tons of flies, some mosquitoes, and lots of huntsman spiders. On the third night, one climbed our friend Ruth's leg (she dealt with it really well, in my estimation - squinching up her eyes and kicking feebly. I would have passed out and fallen in the fire. Our friend Ryan came to her rescue and brushed it off her).

Despite the bugs, though, it was actually tons of fun. We built fires and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows and played campfire games. During the day we went swimming in a nearby lake and chilled out and read and played frisbee and cards and games, and at night we cooked our food and sat around the fire and laughed.