Wednesday 6 May 2009

The day that turned to custard

From the moment our plane touched down in Melbourne Peter, Joseph and Luke's excitement levels started rising...they were going to see Aaron again!  We arrived at Dan and Fiona's house before the kids were home from nursery, giving our boys time to inspect Aaron’s toy collection before he got home.  From the moment that a very excited Aaron burst in the front door and raced upstairs the house descended into a few hours of ‘little boy chaos’…toys, games and books were compared and inspected and four little voices babbled away to each other until bedtime!  Maria looked on and tried chewing on a few of the boys toys and she looked like she was very keen to be joining in!

The kids woke early this morning and had a few hours of playing before we decided to head into the city.  We headed in first, with Dan, Aaron and Maria coming in later to meet us for lunch.  Our first stop was the tourist information, where we learned about the free tourist trams…as the boys had been asking to go on the trams everywhere we went for weeks we decided to do this before lunch.

We headed to the nearest tram stop and were lucky to just make it in time to get onto a tram.  We sat up the back and the boys looked out the windows and enjoyed the ride.  The tram does a circle, so we were planning to do a loop then meet Dan and the kids for lunch.  

We were about halfway round when disaster struck…while the tram was stopped at lights there was a huge bang and a jolt.  Luke fell over and started screaming…we had been hit from behind (at some speed) by another tram!  Once we worked out what had happened and had ascertained that we were all fine (and everyone else on the tram had been reassured that a screaming Luke was okay…he just got a fright) we had to get off the tram and watch a huge ‘tram-traffic jam’ build up behind us.

From this point on our day “turned to custard” (to borrow a phrase from Dean).  As  no-one had been injured and it was clearly the fault of the tram driver behind us we decided to head off on foot, but we were now quite far away from where we were meeting Dan and needed to calm Luke down before we could re-board another tram! 

After half walking, half tram-ing it back to meet Dan, we then got lost (due to confusion on our location when we were talking to Dan), had lunch late, then decided to walk round the centre…however after a tedious stroll at dawdling child pace Joe was exhausted and Luke and Aaron wanted to go home.  So we decided to call it a day and headed back to the car and after negotiating the rather scary and manic Melbourne traffic we made it back home, where the boys enjoyed another few hours of ‘hyper-powered’ excitement before bed.

Let’s hope tomorrow is less eventful…we might even try the free bus!


Nicola

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