Day 1 – To Daylesford

So we finally headed off from Riddell’s Creek!

Thanks to Rod for all his hospitality this week and before. It was a real help to have somewhere to go and to just get out of the house in Carlton! Plus you get the sensational company of Rod Baker. Simply cannot go wrong!

So then, day one – the drive to Daylesford.

It’s not a very long drive at all but we fancied seeing a few places in Victoria before we joined the Great Ocean Road and started to make our way west to Adelaide and beyond. So we drove to the Spa Town of Daylesford (often associated with the nearby smaller town of Hepburn Springs).

It was a pretty looking place but nothing too interesting to do with the town itself. If you had lots of money to splash out on spa treatments, massage and organic herbal stuff – then you were in there (Daylesford has a thriving alternative scene and this shows even at the Tourist Information Office!). Alternatively, if you’re the type to get up at the crack of dawn on a weekend, don your walking boots and then spend the rest of the day trekking 14km through hilly forest and rock landscapes, then yet again you would have been in your element.

Not being too flush and certainly not the types to choose to greet the morning like the lark out of preference, neither of these defining characteristics were of much use to us.

However, we did find a beautiful lake just outside the main town complete with walks, parking space, public toilets and a barbeque (for those of you who haven’t been here, Australia has a kind of national policy of putting free hot-plate barbecues in most of their public spaces). So we decided to choose to sleep there on our first night. Some cheap knock-off meat from the supermarket allowed us to even cook big fat steak sandwiches on the barbecue. Tough life.

There was even a cute little book shop and cafe down by the lake to look around when we got up.

So we survived the first day pretty well. “No dramas”, as the Aussies say.

~ by thesynapse on 5 February, 2009.