Should have been easy ...

We had a simple plan for a couple of days mid week in Melbourne.

J had a medical appointment and it was three or four days after her birthday, so we thought it would be fun to have a couple of days in the city and take in the French Impressionists exhibition at the NGV.

We booked the train, and booked the cats into the cat motel for three nights as we’d be back too late to collect them.

Turned up at the cattery, and they had lost the booking.

However they had space free so we checked the mogs in. So far so good, and the cattery did call us later to say that they’d found the booking and apologised for the inconvenience.

Then on to the bus to take us down to the train station at Wangaratta.

As always it turned up five minutes late.

However, we had a shock when the bus driver asked us where we were going.

“Melbourne, Southern Cross”, we said. 

“There’s no trains” he said.

It turned out that the trains had been cancelled due to an incident involving the fire brigade.

So off we went down to Wangaratta.

When we got there, V/Line had swung into emergency backup mode.

Our bus, the bus from Beechworth, was going express straight to Southern Cross - we were to stay on board for as soon as they loaded up some of the other people going to Melbourne we were off down the freeway to Melbourne.

V/line did an excellent job sorting the problem and getting us there, but the bus wasn’t ideal, a bit past its use by date, with cramped plastic synthetic leather seats, a tiny toilet designed for a dwarf at the back. It was kind of like being stuck on RyanAir or AirAsia but with less space.

On the way out of Wangaratta, we passed a group of fire trucks and police utes clustered around a crossing on the train line. I’m guessing that whatever the problem had been, that had been where it was.

Despite my quibbles about the bus, it drove at a steady 110km/h most of the way down and deposited at Southern Cross a little before 4.30pm.

Now, we had a little problem. J had lost her Myki card, or perhaps more accurately couldn’t remember where she put it after the last time we came back from Melbourne, so we’d phoned it in a day or two before, reporting it as missing.

Normally they send a replacement card in the mail, but as we were travelling to the city, they had said we could pick up a new one at the Public Transport service centre in the train station.

That worked really well, we showed a nice friendly lady the email saying we had reported the card lost, and she issued J a replacement card on the spot.

That was the good bit. The bad bit was that J noticed in the service centre a big sign saying that trains on the Hurstbridge line were suspended due to a derailment at Clifton Hill.

We’d splurged a bit and booked the Pullman in East Melbourne because it had been J’s birthday a few days before (which was why news of the derailment had totally passed us by) and because it’s bang opposite Jolimont train station on guess what, the Hurstbridge line.

Our idea had been to get the train to Jolimont.

Jolimont station - no trains

Obviously that wasn’t going to happen, and peak hour was beginning to rumble into action, which meant the tram, never a good idea with travel bags, was really not going to be an option.

So we jumped on the train to Flinders Street and grabbed a cab from the taxi rank outside. Ten bucks later we were checking  into out hotel.

So far so good.

Our plan had originally been to go out for dinner, but we were knackered and ended up eating in the hotel, and very good it was too. Not the cheapest, but good.

The next day was dull and cold as it often is in Melbourne at this time of year. We had initially planned to go down to the city centre on the tram, but the day was so grey and dispiriting we contented ourselves with brunch at the East Melbourne branch of Laurent - the people who do a lot of artisan breads and so on - and a walk down Bridge Road and then loop back through the gardens, while J reminisced about living in a flat in Clifton Hill while she was a student and riding her bike to Uni through the gardens some time in the Seventies.

Along the way we stopped off at a pharmacy for something and noticed quite an amazing display of old pharmacists bottles on a shelf above the 21st century display items (ever since I documented Dow’s I’ve had a thing for nineteenth century pharmacists’ bottles and jars…)

Basically, we then continued our wander up Bridge Road - lots of empty shops - and then back to the hotel for an hour or two before J’s medical appointment.

That evening we ate at Gepetto’s trattoria - a wonderful traditional family run restaurant - good solid traditional Italian food.

The next day started out with J having a group call with Canada as part of a specialist art course she’s doing.

After that we rattled down to the NGV on the tram for the French Impressionist’s exhibition - like all NGV winter exhibitions it was too crowded - the NGV really don’t seem to have realised that if you sell timed tickets for exhibitions you should cap the numbers in each time slot, and not allow walk ins to buy tickets at busy times.

The exhibition was good, though not brilliant, a few Monets and Pisarros and the odd Renoir.

There were people taking pictures, but J, being an artist, probably confused people by taking close ups of brush strokes and the like as exemplars of the artists’ techniques rather than the pictures themselves.

Because it had been J’s birthday a couple of days before and it would be our wedding anniversary at the end of the week we treated ourselves to a genteel but overpriced lunch in the gallery and a glass of bubbly, followed by a walk round the new acquisitions and a couple of the other galleries of nineteenth century British art, before catching the tram back to the hotel to pick up our bags and get a taxi down to Southern Cross, the main rail station in Melbourne.

Knowing that V/line’s attempts at catering on long distance trains are sporadic and unexciting we picked up some sandwiches from the Woolworths Metro before boarding the train.

The train left on time, arrived in Wangaratta on time, and apart from a slightly annoying child who clearly had behavioural problems, relatively pleasant.

Wangaratta station was a surprise though.

For the last ten years passenger trains in either direction have stopped at platform 1 outside the old ticket hall. As there’s only three passenger trains each way plus a couple of NSW XPT’s that wasn’t a problem.

However this time it was different. As part of the redevelopment of the line they’s built a new platform, platform 2 surprisingly enough.

Now our connecting bus to Beechworth left, as it always has, from outside the old station building on platform 1 and there was no obvious way from getting from platform 2 to platform 1.

However a kind lady, seeing our confusion told us there was a lift at the far end of the platform (aren’t they always) down to the underpass to save us having to drag our bags round the station precinct.

The bus back to Beechworth was slightly late, but was not crowded and delivered us back home on time.

After that it was a case of putting the heating on, a couple of whiskies and a nibble, and then to bed.

It should have been an easy trip, but the problems, none of which were really anyone’s fault made it more of a hassle than it should have been …