Back to 505

 We have come back to 505 St Kilda Rd, to get the car serviced, to visit the Portland and Dunkeld areas and view the Melbourne marathon on the 13th of October.

The visit began with a bit of a negative before we left 'coota.  This arose when I noticed about 9pm on 2 October, that my car keys - and my key to the Werribee poo pits - was not it the basket where it should be.  It was clear that it was somewhere in the house, but where?  After both of us searched for an hour we couldn't find them so gave up and went to bed (not really expecting to go to sleep).  That expectation was met!  About 1:30 I had a thought that I might have taken something out of a cutlery drawer to help take a letterbox key off the ring: a 0.01% chance but better than anything else!  There the 🤬🤬🤬🤬 thing was. Then to sleep for about 5 hours!

On the road by 0815 and feeling OK. There was a surprising amount of traffic on the road, but no biggies. Frances took over driving at Newmerella and we topped up with fuel in Bairnsdale. Along the road to Stratford we noticed 2 Echidnas (about 5km apart) walking along the rumble strip on the LHS of the road. Give those monotremes a Darwin Award. Another bit of amusement was seeing road sign for Sale, with a "SOLD" sticker over it!

The traffic seemed very busy on the Fulham bypass of Sale, and the 2 lots of bridgework gave us chances to examine the works ...

.. and our fellow-travellers.

Back on the highway, it is close to a year since the current road alignment was opened.  They are still fiddling around with "stuff" and as a result put in 5km of 60 limit.

The next image is included to show the number of traffic bollards in use.  There are at least hundreds, possibly thousands, in this area: the Kennards site quotes $17 per week to hire 1 of these so it would seem reasonable to guess that even a large number of these should be costed at $5 per bollard per week so $(5*1000*52) = $260k.  A nice little earner.

I took over again at the last rest stop (with 95 km to go). An easy drive, with very good fuel consumption (4.9l/100km). The traffic was not even backed up in the Domain tunnel!

After unloading we walked down to Prahran Square where I joined the Stonnington Library - a very painless process - and we went to Woolworths. Getting home the Winter Garden was pretty warm (the maximum temperature at the Wunderground site on the far side of Fawkner Part had been 29.9C) so we opened the louvres to cool it off. This allowed the traffic noise in but a good trade off. As the sun set - about 1815 the port gave some nice photos, using a variety of settings.




About 1830 the light was getting difficult to read by so we were getting ready to move indoors when the Alfred helicopter came for a visit.  It seemed to be in a hurry: I hope the patient is OK.


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