Melbourne airport doesn't have a tourist information center – at least we couldn't find it. We were trying to find the best way to get to our hotel. And there was no one there to tell us. We ended up taking a taxi which was probably the best way for us to get there.

Our hotel was one of three 'art hotels' in Melbourne. Ours was called the Olsen after painter John Olsen and is located in the South Yarra section of the city. It contains a large number of Olsen's original works. He is the dean of Australia's artists and Laura finds his work fabulous. The hotel itself is an up-scale boutique hotel and really comfortable.

. We arrived late, actually we lost an hour-and- a- half to time zone changes, so 5.30 Ayers Rock times translated to 8.00 pm Melbourne time. With some time to kill, we went to a movie – The Performance Christopher Walken, Seymour Phillip Hoffman and … It didn't have much of a stiry but the performances were really good.

We spent the next day visiting all the galleries around our hotel. We got a good overview of contemporary Australian artists. Once they learned that Laura had an art company in America, the gallery owners were more than happy to discuss the artwork in their galleries.

Most of the art was decent some was very good and some was bad but there was one artist whose work was really inventive.Troy Emery uses fringe and cotton balls dyed various colors and assembled over a frame to create large colorful animals. Looking at his works made us smile. Unfortunately we were not allowed to photograph the art.

The next day we picked up a car at the airport and drove to the Mornington Peninsula about 60 miles south of Melbourne. Normally it would be an easy hour drive but Melbourne was having a Grand Prix, time trials started the day we left, so a lot of streets were closed. We got shunted off what would have been the normal route and ended up having to go through the city streets. . Driving a right-hand-drive car in heavy city traffic when we didn't know where we were going was something of an experience. It took us over two hours to get to our resort and without the GPS we'd probably still be driving.