Day 6: Travel Day
Welcome
Yesterday we travelled from Perth to Melbourne.
Opening the curtains of our hotel room revealed another perthect morning in this West Australian metropolis. The sky emerged from leafy suburbs with a delicious gradient and when we emerged into the outside air we found it to be of a premium quality, cool and clean. We stopped for breakfast on the way to the airport, a premeditated detour that had been arranged the night before when Liz vetted all the city’s bakeries on behalf of the band. The chosen establishment was called Croff and they specialised in pastries, specifically the recently invented fusion delight known as the Croffle. I stayed with the tried and true, though, ordering an eggs benedict croissant for my first course and an almond croissant for dessert.
The number 7 and 8 motorways carried us east towards Perth Airport, these pieces of infrastructure that had been bequeathed names like the Graham Farmer Freeway and the Rivervale Wattle Grove Link, their meanings immortalised through pristine layers of asphalt and shiny guard rails. We were checked in by a pleasant Virgin Airways attendant, a specialist who managed to get our overweight bags through the system without charging us any money. All our oversized items had to be carried away on an oversized conveyer belt and it seemed that the man operating this machine was working two jobs. Time after time he would load our item and then walk away into the back room through a set of doors, presumably to unload our items at the other end of the belt.
The flight was delayed by 62 minutes and the rumour we heard was that the plane had a broken seatbelt. Thankfully we weren’t part of the group that had already begun boarding and been stranded in the jetway while they fixed the problem. At 12:22pm we rotated off Perth Airport’s Runway 21 and began to climb rapidly while executing a series of gentle banking turns that eventually set us on our heading, slightly south of east.
For a while we flew across neatly allocated patches of farmland, fields wearing shades of faded green like sage, artichoke, and moss. Then for a while we left land behind, and we were over the Great Australian Bight, the giant bay that forms part of the mainland’s southern coastline. Our descent was over the farmland of western Victoria and as we approached Melbourne the pilot turned to offer us a great view of the cityscape, the flat expanse lit by golden hour, and a sparkly cluster skyscrapers emerging at the edge of the bay known as Port Phillip.
We disembarked and headed through to find our rental cars. A KIA Carnival was waiting for us, finished in Snow White Pearl, gleaming aggressively under the harsh fluorescent battens of the parking garage. Our second vehicle was a fine vehicle, a brand new Toyota Hiace. An efficient van. The original van. The van that inspired all vans. The van that inspired all people called Van. It was finished in French Vanilla, a gentle shade of white that is perfectly suited to any mood or function. Since 2021 this is the only colour in which you can order a Toyota Hiace in Australia.
The roads were quiet, and we enjoyed a relaxing drive to our Airbnb. There was nothing remarkable to share about our new lodgings, and perhaps the most interesting feature was the quadruple door mat. We wiped our shoes and headed inside to eat and sleep.
