A Melbourne trip: Day 1

 We haven't seen the daughter for a while so decided to head down for a few days.  As this was quite a quick decision I thought it unlikely we'd be able to get into the IBIS on a Saturday night so explored AirBnB, looking to stay in Docklands.  They offered us about 450 places and seemed to define Docklands as including St Kilda, Footscray, Fitzroy and Collingwood.  (The latter 3 examples made me think of a joke from the 1980s "Which three AFL teams start with F?" to which the answer was "Fitzroy, Footscray and F..... Collingwood.")  We eventually chose a place in West Melbourne - Rosslyn St, close to the Flagstaff Gardens. To the trip.

Bird of the Day got off to a good start with a flock of Choughs before Orbost.  That got topped by 3 Emus in a paddock at Newmerella.

Don't you love road works?  Because of the centre dividers 400m of work required 2 kms of contra flow with huge tailbacks. 

Getting in to Sale there were some nice old buildings: a convent...
... possibly a former bank ...
.. and a pub ...
.. as well as the usual appalling ribbon development beloved of Shire (in this case Wellington) planners.
Leaving Sale we met another tradition of the private sector.  A water tanker so full it spills its load all over the road.

To put some variety in the drive we decided to put in an hour at Holey Pains NP.  This is in the Haunted Hills, mainly covered with pine plantations.

Our GPS and reality didn't match well and tried taking us (eventually) down a road behind a locked gate.  Looking at the Parks map of the area lead us into a possibly navigable swamp, followed closely by a sand dune.  Reverse gear was employed and we followed the Parks map to this charming track.  Perhaps 4 metres wide but the Mazda made it OK.

We eventually got onto the South Gippsland Highway and (via Longford for Rosedale.  Quite a few mre Emus along the way.  The last 5km on the M1 were very slow but got to the apartment we are renting on time and then walked through Flagstaff Gardens to our daughters place.   En route we noticed this possum but didn't try to pat it.
We also met this sausage dog.  Apparently many people in Melbourne put illuminations on their dogs so that if they bolt they can be seen.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more