Warrnambool - Melbourne

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Photo's for this are below on Jan 13th!
We had to pack up today as we were leaving and heading back to Melbourne. We were stopping off at Sovereign Hill in Ballarat on the way.
Sovereign Hill is the gold fields living museum. It is a village with blacksmiths, bakers, grocers and sweet shops all in period dress. There are also the diggers huts, tents, old meeting places, horse drawn carriages and the Chinese Village. It costs around $37 each to get in but well worth it. We spent about 4 hours there but could easily have spent the whole day. There are different events happening throughout the day at different times. We got to see gold smelting & pouring which was a brick of real gold worth $120 000, The march of the red coats, saw how the steam machines worked, walked through the village & went to school - we got to write with quills and ink ( childish we know! ), the Diggers Walk which took us around explaining the history of the gold fields and lives of the men and women in the 1850’s, ran up to the Candle making and dipping, had an ice-cream, went to Browns confectionary where we got to see how the old fashioned boiled sweets are made - and had a couple of tastings! My favourite was the raspberry drops! All the machinery here was donated by the Brown’s family, they were the original shop keepers who came from England in the 1850’s! Chris had a go at finding gold in the stream, went and did the Red Hill Mine Tour, which was underground and walked around the Chinese Village.
The miners during the gold rush only lived on lamb and bread, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The easiest thing to get to drink was alcohol, even though it was banned on the mines it was easier to store than water. About $10 billion of gold was found between 1850 and 1905 here - in old money!
We got a free ticket to see the gold museum with our entry ticket so once we had finished we went there. It had lot’s of old photo’s of the area, some beautiful paintings and the last belongings found in the area, old machinery and lot’s of gold pieces from various areas in Australia and America.
We drove back to Melbourne which was another 1hr30 away and arrived at Sarah’s around 7pm. No-one was home, she didn’t leave a key as she thought at least one person out of 4 would be there! Luckily we only had to wait about 20 mins and Juilian, one of the housemates opened the door! Sarah eventually came home around 9pm after doing her silversmith course for jewellery.

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