We had a short weekend trip to western Victoria which was something that I needed to do for work anyway. We visited the Grampians National Park and Ballarat. The Grampians is a mountain range that literally pops up in an otherwise flat area and has a lot of natural beauty with lakes and waterfalls and a lot of wildlife. Ballarat is near where gold was found which started the Australian gold rush. We did a long hike one day to the top if the Pinnacles and a shorter one to MacKenzie Falls on the other day.
Pinnacles
Dadswells Bridge
Saw a lot of kangaroos – many running out in front of my car. I didn’t hit any – but there was a lot of carcai on the road from others with slower reactions that me. Once we got to the AirBNB, we had kangaroos and wallabies outside our door.
Although only a couple of hours from Melbourne, Dadswell Bridge is very remote. Our Airbnb was 30 minutes from the nearest place to eat. The remoteness also meant that it was very dark – and we finally were in a remote dark place, with a clear sky, and no moon. You could see the Milky Way galaxy and we were able to get some good pictures with an iPhone – no elaborate long exposure set up required.
Great Western Winery
Stopped by one of the oldest wineries in Australia on the return – Great Western/Shipllet. It was pretty interesting as it had miles of underground caves built in the 1800s to store wine – the gold diggers needed to do something once the gold ran out. It was good to be in the caves as it was around 100 degrees. We headed home but the next day they had historically poor fire conditions with hot temps and hot dry winds and a full shut down of all work was mandated in the area, but unfortunately a bush fire started and burned a lot of the area that we had been in the prior day. And like Oklahoma – late afternoon thunderstorms came in with tornados (which is rare in Australia).
We have Super Monday in Australia for the Super Bowl – the game starts about 10am local time. I had planned to go to a local establishment to watch, but I was scheduled into some meetings on Monday and missed most of the game. But because of the Swiftie factor, the game was on in the lunch room at work and I got to see the 4th quarter (but missed overtime). I had to address the following questions:
- Why does the game keep stopping for adverts?
- Which one on Kansas in Taylor’s boyfriend?
- Is football closer to rugby league, rugby union, or the AFL?
- And I had to clarify – there are no ties – this is America
Speaking of Taylor Swift – she came to Melbourne for the biggest concert series in Australian history (and her biggest as well). We had to leave because we were priced out of our AirBNB and went to Tasmania which will be the subject of a future blog….so we missed history. A little homework for people over the next month – the F1 is coming to Melbourne, so watch a couple of episodes of “Drive to Survive” to get a sense of the F1.