So, there we were in Melbourne, reasonably bright-eyed, relatively bushy tailed and contemplating the means of filling in the eight hours or so before we would be heading off to Mr Springsteen's first Melbourne show.
As far as Madam was concerned there was a degree of uncertainty about the morning's activities, but from where I was sitting things seemed pretty clear cut. We had to catch up with The brother and the members of a reasonably scattered family for lunch, which would probably be something very close to yum cha.
FRom where I was sitting, the best way of arranging that was to pick a fairly obvious rendezvous and then rely on local knowledge to select an option from the multitude of possibilities in Chinatown.
On that basis, I reckoned there was no need for breakfast, and it was a matter of filling in time until lunch, spending a bit of quality time with some good company, parting ways after lunch and doing another assassination job on the time until we were ready to head off to the concert. A five o'clock start meant that should not be an issue.
Breakfast not an issue due to recent indulgences.
Things started to go awry when I managed to establish contact with The brother, recently returned from an out of town conference and not quite in the world of the wakeful when I called. The result was a suggestion that we call back later to nominate a venue, which wasn't quite what I had in mind.
Still, there were other matters that needed to be dealt with first, with the most pressing being the need to sort out something and get an inkling of the workings of the Myki card since it seemed paying cash for public transport fares was no longer an option.
The most obvious way of tackling that was to hoof it over to Federation Square and run a few things past someone in the Visitor Centre who knew the lie of the land and could point us towards the best option.
That took us through a subset of the lane ways and alleys and delivered a reminder of why Hughesy had picked the Metro Apartments on Bank Place as the base for our four nights in Melbourne. Basically, I figured we could spend much of the time getting a good idea of what was hidden away down those alleyways, but madam! predictably, had other ideas.
Which, of course, was one of the reasons we were scoping out the public transport situation.
A conversation with a very helpful woman in the visitor Centre sorted the Myki bit out, and we ended up buying two cards, loading them with twelve dollars' credit, which would cover whatever public transport we used on Saturday and Sunday. If we were headed further afield on the Monday we'd have to top them up, but, as indicated, my preference was to get a good look at the CBD rather than venturing off into the wilds of Richmond, Prahran or Toorak.