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I have had a lot of trouble with blogs lately. Rather than put as my latest, this entry was put at the very beginning of my blog entries. I deleted it from there, and tried to send it again, but wasn't able to do so. I'll try again for those who tell me they missed seeing it and apologies for those who've already seen it.
After our second night in Castlemaine, we drove to the city of Maryborough. For a city of under 8,000 people, it has some grand buildings, and the grandest of all is their railway station .. it's huge! And there's a tale of how it came about ...
To quote the Station Antiques site
'Alfred Outtrim (local Councillor) while on a visit to Melbourne called in to see the Minister of Rail & Transport, Duncan Gillies. Mr. Gillies had business interests in Maryborough, coupled with his electorate in Victoria, listened to Outtrim plead for a new station.
'Have you a plan?" Gillies said, "Of course not" said Alfred, "Then you must go to the Railway Planning Office and get one".
On arriving at the Office, Outtrim took a liking to one plan in particular. No-one
seems to know how it happened or why a classified important plan, which was of Spencer Street Station Melbourne was removed from the Railways Planning Office without notice.
The plan was taken back to Gillies after viewing from local Council and he agreed to put tenders out to build the station.'
And that is how Maryborough has a station which was the plan for Spencer Street Station in Melbourne!
We had a look inside the grand building, with it's interesting timber ceiling, and large rooms - there is now a large antique shop and a restaurant in the old cafe, one wall complete with big fireplace sporting a roaring fire.
One little town we went to was Creswick - we went through their knitting mill there, to Clunes, one of the towns where Something in the Air was filmed, but it was quite unpleasant to be out of the motor home, there was a cold wind blowing and we had to rug up each time we stepped outside.
We arrived back in Bendigo and booked into a caravan park there for the night. This morning we woke up to a very cold morning .. minus two
Doug at Echuca
amongst the river red gums degrees! We had intended going south towards the outskirts of Melbourne but a top temperature of 13 was predicted there, as well as rain and hail! It didn't take much for us to change our plans .. north and somewhere warmer, and quickly!
We drove straight to Echuca where we had lunch amongst the beautiful river red gums, by the Murray River, and watched the littlepaddlewheelers steaming up the river with their tourist passengers.
We crossed into NSW and the long drive through grain growing/sheep breeding areas to Deniliquin, the ute capital of Australia. It's amazing how huge the grain silos are in all these western towns.
And now we're in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area and the main town of the Riverina, Griffith. There is so much grown here and we have passed citrus orchards, vineyards, paddocks of rice and wheat, etc.
The southern states have had an early touch of winter with snow. It's cool here but not the icy cold that Victoria was experiencing. We still have to go over the mountains back to Sydney so I guess we'll get colder before we're home.
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