Jan 2023 Part 1: 1000 Steps, Australian Open and the NGV

We stayed in Melbourne for most of the summer this year, except for the six days we spent in Phillip Island. The month seems to have flown past, and we are back to reality with school and work starting for everyone this week. 

Here are some of the highlights of our summer with Nannie and Grampy.

1000 Steps

We all (except for Ollie) took a trip to the Dandenong Ranges early in January. It was the first time we'd been to the 1000 Steps since returning to Melbourne at the start of 2021. There was a huge storm in June 2021 that resulted in a lot of trees falling down along the track. The clean up took so long that it only reopened in October this year! 

The steps are dedicated to the Australian Military Forces who fought and died in Papua New Guinea in World War 2. The steps are meant to be reminiscent of the first 100 metres of the Kokoda Track in PNG and are a dedication to the Australian Military Forces who fought and died there.

The steps are both a tourist destination and popular with local hikers and fitness enthusiasts who like the challenge - some running up the steep steps. It can get pretty crowded but luckily for us it wasn't too busy when we went. I was worried that Ella wouldn't make it up but the promise of an afternoon ice cream seemed to motivate her!

Here we are at the start of the steps, looking fresh and ready for the challenge!

And here we are, finished our hike and still smiling! We managed to do the steps in about 20-25 minutes, which was pretty good considering Ella was with us. 

After the hike we headed to the nearby town of Olinda. There is a famous pie shop that Andy always likes visiting when we are in the area. We then convinced to Ella to wait for her ice cream so that we could pick up Ollie and then go to our local gelato shop. I feel bad for Ollie when we do fun excursions while he is in daycare! 

Australian Open

We got grounds passes to the tennis on Day 3 of the tournament this year. The weather was rainy in the morning but Andy and I figured "it's Melbourne" and it would clear up. There were three Canadians playing tennis that day so it seemed like the perfect day for us to go. 

We stopped for brunch in on our way to the tennis, hoping the rain would clear up. Here we are heading to the car... doesn't the weather look great for tennis?! Typical Melbourne... you'd have never guessed that the tennis was delayed the day before due to extreme heat!

The rain was persistent throughout the early afternoon. It was a light drizzle, sometimes nothing more than a fine mist in the air, but it would just not clear up. All the outside courts were majorly delayed. Andy and the kids went to the "Ball Park", which is the kids area of the Australian Open, and they were pretty happy hanging out there. They didn't seem to mind that there was no tennis to watch!

Meanwhile, my parents and I investigated upgrading our tickets to Margaret Court Arena, where Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime was playing shortly. Andy and I decided that it was too expensive to upgrade with the kids, given they probably wouldn't sit through the whole game anyway. But my parents got tickets and ended up seeing a very exciting game, where Felix came back from 2 sets down to win the match.

I'm not sure how, but Andy and I managed to keep the kids amused for nearly SIX HOURS before the rain had finally stopped for long enough for the outside matches to start. We spent a lot of the time in Kia Arena where the top half of the seats were under cover. The kids had a blast. We took turns taking them for walks, getting food, and they ran around the arena stands and through Melbourne Park. The one nice thing about the weather was that it was not busy at all so there was a lot more space for the kids to be... well, kids. 

It was even kind of fun to watch how they dried off the courts periodically:

Around 5:30pm the matches on the outside courts finally started, and we watched Canadian Bianca Andreescu play Cristina Bucsa from Spain in the Kia Arena. It was a long match (nearly three hours) and I was surprised at how attentive the kids were, especially Ollie. Unfortunately Andreescu lost but it was a pretty exciting match, especially after all that waiting around!

We stayed for another hour and then Andy and I headed home with two very tired kids. My parents stayed to watch the third Canadian, Denis Shapovalov, play his match, which went until about midnight. Andy and I caught a bit of that one on TV before heading to bed. Overall considering the weather we had a really fun day, and the Australian Open continues to be one of my favourite events in Melbourne.

Girls day at the NGV

A few days after the tennis my mom and I took Ella and one of her friends to the National Gallery of Victoria. This is one of my favourite places to take the kids at the moment. For a week in January they had a kids festival on, with activities on throughout the day.

No visit to the NGV is complete without first stopping to check out the water-wall at the entrance. No matter how many times we go this never gets old.

Next we headed outside to the gardens. It was a beautiful morning and my mom and I got a coffee while the girls ran around the Temple of Boom installation outside. 

Next we were in the Grand Hall for a K Pop dance lesson. I thought the girls would be well in to this but they really just wanted to do their own dancing instead.

We stumbled on this video of two sets of hands putting rubber bands around a watermelon. I knew from a previous science experiment at my school that eventually the pressure from the bands becomes so much that the watermelon explodes. So we sat down and watched as more and more rubber bands were put around the watermelon.

We waited... and waited... and waited....

Eventually the watermelon started to change shape.

And then finally, after about 20 minutes, the top of the watermelon popped off! When we did this at my school the watermelon actually exploded, so this popping off was a bit of an anticlimax to be honest! But I was very impressed at how patiently the girls waited and watched this very repetitive video... I mean art.

Next we spent time exploring the NGV's Freedom of Movement exhibition. From the NGV's website:

Crossing cultures, disciplines and traditional divides, Freedom of Movement: Contemporary Art and Design from the NGV Collection presents NGV Collection works bound together by their capacity to reveal the centrality of movement through the gestural, technological, and geographical, in contemporary art and design practice today.

With over 60 works from the NGV Collection, the exhibition includes furniture, lighting, painting, film, sculpture and installation. The exhibition surveys NGV’s commitment to collecting new, ground-breaking contemporary art and design that explores, unpicks, critiques and toys with contemporary issues.

There was a lot of interesting works within the three rooms of this collection and the girls were engaged with it for quite a long time. It was a really fantastic day overall and very enjoyable to spend it with both my mom and my daughter, along with Ella's friend. 

And that's it for part 1 of our summer holidays! Part 2 coming soon...