Blogs from Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, Oceania

Day 26 – 18/3/2015 Went for a short drive to Kennington. Small reservoir with a beautiful walking track all the way around & opposite a shopping centre. Tried fishing for a short while with no touches. Water was dead still & not the greatest conditions for fishing. Hopefully will get another chance for a few casts, weather permitting. Spend the bulk of the rest of the day at Bendigo Hospital, having treatment on a growth on the bottom of my foot. Got some wonderful painkillers so hopefully things will improve quickly. Went for an evening walk down the road; with those brilliant painkillers I never felt a thing & was able to go quite a distance. Had noisy people on one side of us in the caravan park, so not the greatest night for sleeping. Day ... read more

Wow so only 18 days to go! Getting super excited! My sister Jen and I have been counting down since 100 days so we are stoked to be at 18 already! I've started packing and gathering some final bits and pieces, making it seem all too real that we are actually going. We've been planning for about 2 years so it's definately been a long time coming! So for anyone who doesn't know I'll run you through the basic outline of our trip. We are heading to the US and a little bit of Canada over Christmas and new year, spending a white christmas in Whistler and new years eve in New York. These are the places we are going to in order: 1. Los Angeles 2. San Francisco 3. Whistler, Canada 4. New York 5. ... read more

It is never nice waking up in the middle of the night to a loud clap of thunder, especially when you are camping. But, we did and survived. We also booked in to stay a few more days while it poured over most of Victoria and NSW. The Weather Bureau forecast a nice start to Sunday, so we held on to the hope that their 'chocolate wheel' was in fine form. It was, Sunday morning was beautiful for packing up. We finally left Bendigo about 10am and started our trip towards home, through Shepparton and Benella, eventually getting on to the Hume Highway and travelling north. The Hume is an absolute beautiful piece of divided road. Great road surface, lots of rest stops and facilities and 110km speed limit. A great way to get from A ... read more

On our second day here, we began with breakfast at The Pancake Kitchen in downtown Ballarat. Scott and I both ordered the Country Breakfast which featured eggs, stewed tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, pancakes, and “an entire rasher of bacon,” which, as it turned out, is more bacon than I could even finish! A cute side note: when we asked the waitress where the maple syrup came from, she responded “Oh, it’s organic Vermont maple syrup from Canada.” From the lovely Pancake Kitchen we headed out of Ballarat, hitting the highway towards Bendigo, another gold mining town about the size of Ballarat two hours away. On the way we stopped for water at Castlemaine, a small town with some cute stores (these small towns remind me of the small towns in the mountains of Colorado – quaint, old, ... read more

Tuesday 7h February started dry and bright although there was a fair bit of cloud about. We woke quite early because the exit barrier at the caravan park makes a noise when a vehicle travels over it and our current site is close to the exit/entrance. Many people in the park are residents and obviously start work early - we were aware of the barrier noise from about 6:00am onwards. We had no major tasks today except to get ready for a trip away from Melbourne – possibly our last trip on this voyage around Australia. We thought to head towards Bendigo tomorrow and to drift around North West Victoria before returning to Mansfield where the car and caravan would be put into storage. With that in mind, we decided to buy some covers for the ... read more