Roadside

A mini road trip today took us - courtesy of W - from Kangaroo Flat, where she stays, to the famous bakery at Bridgewater-on-Lodden, through the cute town of Inglewood, with its many antique shops, then across open countryside once filled with gold mines (Tarnagulla offered an interesting perspective on gold mining on the return journey), eventually to St Arnaud, where Mr A's mother was born. We found three graves in the cemetery - great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents (on the paternal line of the maternal grandmother), and one set of great-great-great-grandparents. There were probably more. After a cafe stop in St Arnaud, where we also viewed Storer Lane and Vallance Lane (families had their own corners of town in this part of Victoria), we left no wiser as to how Mr A's grandfather chose to alight here and look for work (and indeed find a wife...), after his long journey from Ulster. But we did come away with a new fact about Mr A's grandmother which W's mother let us have. She hadn't even previously told her daughter about it. It's funny how new things come out when you sit down to reminisce.

The weather was glorious all day. Clear blue skies and around 19 degrees, unless you caught the sneaky wind. On the way back, the light on the farmland was just perfect, so I asked W to stop so I could get some photos. We saw a lot of this type of scene out of the car windows during the day, with various types of indigenous trees and the wattle (which at a distance looks like gorse or broom, but doesn't when you get closer to it). By way of contrast, though, we also took a small side trip to the Kooyora State Park, where the caves are famous for being a hideout for the bushranger Captain Melville. The rock formations are volconic and like a mini Uluru (see extra).

A fascinating day seeing some "real" Australia. The location is a bit approximate.