The O'Keeffe's of Melbourne

While in Melbourne we stayed with Clare and David O’Keeffe in their delightful house in Hampton, one of the bay side communities just outside central Melbourne. Clare is my cousin, her mother and my father being sister and brother, so we share grandparents. I do not think that Clare and David ever intended to end up in Melbourne, or indeed Australia. They just ended up there as David pursued his career as a ship broker. It has not been a bad journey for them and they certainly enjoy a very nice lifestyle.

We did all of our normal tour activities and they were good enough to join us and show us where everything was. David is into wine so when not driving he joined me at the wine tasting and Marion, who was pretty much wine tasted out, was able to go off with Clare and look round the winery gardens.

We did some tasting in both the Mornington Peninsular and the Yarra Valley. I will recount the tasting in some future posts when I can spend the time in reviewing my scribbled notes suffice it to say that this is the region which has taken on the challenge of growing the pinot noir grape. I am not sure they have succeeded though I did like the wines of the Moorooduc Estate in the Mornington. We also visited several gardens and Melbourne itself all of which I will be writing up in some future posts.

We did not do any evening eating out, though we did have several lunches out at the wineries and one memorable lunch at Miss Marples Restaurant in the Dandenong Mountains, which was excellent and incredibly filling. The size of the ice cream deserts in this restaurant is something to behold and they must do the best bread and butter pudding in the southern hemisphere. Clare preferred to cook all our evening meals and we ate like kings. I think it must be something in the genes because Clare’s catering reminded me of the meals my Grandma Durrell used to provide on Sunday afternoons, wonderfully prepared, very rich and very filling. As a result of eating in we ended up consuming a fair amount of David’s wines which were excellent. I wish I had made notes of what we had consumed but alas I didn’t.

While with Clare and David we were lucky enough to have one day when Lucinda their daughter was there. She left on the Saturday night for China where she was doing a short assignment to a Panda breeding colony as part of her degree course. We heard back from her that she had arrived safely so I am sure she will have a good time.

Our time passed all too quickly with the O’Keeffe’s. We managed to get some of the mundane things done like laundry and we recharged our batteries both literally and figuratively for the next stage of the tour.