From there, we headed back to the hotel to rest up before heading off to the evening's entertainment. With a five o'clock start and an unknown venue it seemed like a good idea to start moving around 3:45, and as we made our way down Market Street it looked like the weather was holding off. There was a forecast of rain (60%, 1 to 5 mm), and the optimism lasted about as long as it took for the Route 70 tram to roll along. Half way down Flinders Street there were cars with windscreen wipers in action, and when we alighted at Stop 7D a fair proportion of the inflowing crowd were improvising some form of protection from the drizzle.
We hung around in the shelter at the tram stop long enough for the drizzle to become muzzle, and could have waited until it stopped altogether before heading across to AAMI, but another incoming tram appeared around the bend.
Still, it wasn't too bad as we covered the rest of the distance to the venue and sheltered at ground level. The tickets pointed us towards Gate 1, which was up a flight of stairs, and with no idea of what lay at the top it seemed like a good idea to wait.
And, as it turned out, we didn't have to wait long, and waiting had been the appropriate response. We arrived to find a queue out in the open, and a couple of security people conducting reasonably thorough investigations of anything that might contain contraband.
It took a good seven or eight minutes to make our way inside, and, once we had, a quick check revealed seats that were under cover as long as the wind was in the right quarter. I suspected it wouldn't be if the muzzle resumed, but it didn't and we sat through the rest of opener Dan Sultan's set. The reformed Hunters & collectors delivered a solid warmup, and it was then a case of waiting an hour or so for the main act, reviewed here.
There must have been \thirty to forty thousand in the audience, and moving them was going to prove interesting. Not that you'd expect any difficulty, but it was a matter of how. A fair proportion of the crowd looked to be turning left as we made our way down from Gate One, but the majority seemed to be headed to the right, which meant the possibility of long queues at the tram stop.
Fortunately most of them headed on towards Richmond Station, and there were car parking facilities in the area, so the queue at the tram stop wasn't overly long.
It was, in fact, just long enough to have the top trimmed off by a single tram, and an articulated version followed shortly afterwards. That got us back into the city, and may well have taken us further down Flinders Street, but we alighted at the station, prompted by my belief that the tram wouldn't be going further. There were a number of passengers who stayed aboard, and several waiting at the stop who boarded so we might have saved ourselves a bit of a walk if we'd been quicker on our feet.
But we weren't, and a dogleg up Swanston Street to Collins and a brief debate about the likelihood of a late night tram saw us hoofing it the rest of the way. Predictably, about half way along the tram we could have caught passed us by.
Back at the hotel it didn't take long to tap out a reasonably accurate setlist, and once that little task was done there were Zs to be pushed up, and logs that needed sawing.