Closing the year of 2024 with a week long family road trip covering Albury, Melbourne and Canberra. It’s always a good time spending time with family and with some of our old church friends.
Road trip with Tesla
Traveling with an electric car does require a planning ahead as there are not as many chargers compared to petrol stations. My Tesla model 3 has a 425 km range fully charged – which is plenty for everyday use but for this road trip I wish it is more.
The main inconvenience is the time to charge – on average we spent around 30 mins to charge the car – this is using Tesla superchargers. From Albury to Melbourne, there was one supercharger (Euroa) with a long queue, thankfully we had just enough charge to skip that one.
We charged 11 times using Tesla superchargers during the whole trip, kind of glad owning a Tesla and have access to its charging network (note: some of Tesla superchargers are open to other brands too).
Albury
I was quite surprised on how developed and lively Albury is. We ate dinner at Albury Brewhouse which was surprisingly good! The loaded fries is so good 😋
Notable mention – nice ice cream at Monumental ice creamery.
Melbourne City
We stayed at an apartment in A’Beckett street near RMIT – which is close to everywhere. Melbourne certainly has a lot more food options compared to Sydney and yes we ate quite a bit. Some notable places that we visited:
- Lulu’s Char Koay Teow – we ate once at the Hardware Ln shop and the following day at the newly opened Chadstone branch. It was good – but not that good that it’s a must visit in my opinion, on par with other good Malaysian places in Sydney. The chicken rice was really delicious.
- Code Black Coffee at Flinders Lane – had a nice single origin long black. I wanted to do more cafe crawl however some of the famous cafes that I wanted to visit were closed (due to holiday period).
- Zhan Beers at 474 Little Lonsdale St is certainly memorable, we ate our dinner there before watching the fireworks. The place was small and cozy, the food is good, super friendly service, our yummy makgeolli was served on chilled aluminium bowls adding to the charm of the place. The vibe was just great with this place.
In one of the days we visited Chadstone Shopping Centre, apparently the biggest shopping mall in Australia – which I have never heard of 😅 It has Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands vibe – with its layout and its high-end label shops. We didn’t get to explore much unfortunately as it was nearing closing time when we finished dinner.
We went to watch 9:30pm New Year Eve’s fireworks at Docklands, we miscalculated time taken to walk there from our dinner place (Zhan Beers) – we arrived at 9:35 and caught a little glimpse of the fireworks — we were quite disappointed that the fireworks were not shot high enough hence it’s obstructed by buildings and it was finished in about 10 mins. We went back to our apartment after that and experienced the midnight fireworks from our balcony (we could see some reflection of fireworks on the building surround us), again it was over quite quickly to our dismay – while the Sydney fireworks was still ongoing in our TV.
Geelong, Torquay and 12 Apostles
On Monday we did an ambitious day trip from Melbourne to 12 Apostles via Geelong. We stopped by at Geelong for lunch and I was pleasantly surprised with how developed Geelong is (compared to our visit 7 years ago).
We then drove to Leopold and then to Torquay then continued to 12 Apostles.
12 Apostles is just absolutely stunning – for me, this is the highlight of the trip, amazing God’s creation. If I have the opportunity to go back – I’d do a multiple days trip starting from Geelong and driving along the Great Ocean Road. There are many things to see in this part of Victoria.
To be noted there was a porting mobile number drama during this trip, iykyk.
Canberra
We end our trip with relaxing 2 days in Canberra. We visited Mint Museum, a couple of lookouts, Parliament House and National Arboretum Canberra.
