This Adventurous Age

Adventures travelling and working around Australia.

Monthly Archives: September 2023


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2018 Travels March 22-29 (3)

MARCH 22-29     HOME TO MARONG AND BACK (3)

We left the caravan park at 9.45am for the return trip home.

Marong en-suite site

It was the Thursday before Easter, so we were expecting the meet the usual exodus of traffic from Melbourne.

Only a couple of hundred metres from the park, a loud alarm sounded. After the usual “what’s that” panic, worked out that it was the tyre pressure monitoring system (TPMS) we’d installed a few years back. I had wanted it so we could monitor the tyres on the Terios when it was being towed behind Bus. John had put sensors on the Bus too, but they’d caused all sorts of problems and had been abandoned, with John telling me it was all a waste of money. Today, he conceded that the system had proved its worth! Without it, we would probably have ruined an almost new tyre on the Terios, and had it blown out, may have damaged the car as well.

A rear tyre on the Terios – that he had suspected a while ago of having a slow leak – was registering 15 instead of the required 26.

We found a place to safely park beside the road and John got set up to re-inflate the tyre: new air compressor out and attached to Terios battery, assorted hoses and gauges all came into play.

Unfortunately, the label on the part that attached to the tyre was in French. John belongs to the operating style that resorts to instructions only after all else has failed. In this case, he couldn’t even read the instructions!

The air compressor ran noisily. Eventually he realized that the tyre was deflating further, not going up. More fiddling about ensued, while compressor ran on. John tried applying different end bits to the hose – most of which didn’t seem to fir anything we could see. Maybe there are different standard sizes in France? The bargain portable compressor was not looking such a bargain, right about now.

Eventually he gave up and we proceeded to change the now very flat tyre for the spare. We’d never had reason to use the Terios jack before and discovered that it was a tedious little piece of gear that took forever to wind up, half a turn at a time. Ditto to wind down again, after the wheel change.

It was 11.30 when we got going again. Nearly two hours taken….some frayed tempers….

Driving towards home, we discussed keeping a bottle style jack in Terios – much faster to use. John promised to sort out the operation of the air compressor – before it was needed again! I thought back to the built in air compressor that we’d fitted to the old Defender, with its reserve air tank, and wondered if there was room somewhere in the Terios to get one of those? Over the years, we’d had ample practice at using the Defender one.

After Heathcote, we began passing lots of oncoming traffic, as holiday makers headed north for Easter. The effects of slower caravans on the traffic was obvious, especially when there were several in line. At times, there would be a tail back of vehicles for more than a km. This was particularly bad in the stretch between Seymour and Yea, where there are mots of bends and few places to overtake. We were pleased to be going the other way.

By the time we were going over the Divide and down towards Yarra Glen, it was mid afternoon and the oncoming traffic was quite constant.

Stopped as usual at Glenburn to refuel, where there was easy access. $1.347cpl.

In our street, we went through the usual routine of stopping by our drive to unhitch the car on the flat, before taking Bus up into the sloping parking bay.

When I went to start the car to put it away…nothing! Dead lights and a slight groan from the starter. I cursed the bloody air compressor – and John for running it off the car battery for so long while he fiddled about with hoses and fittings. Clearly, it had pretty well flattened the battery, and whatever juice had been left had probably expired while being towed, with the Accessories function having to be on so the steering is unlocked. However, this alone should not have been a problem – we have towed the car like that all day, at times, and the battery has been fine.

So – call to the RACV. By the time they arrived we had Bus unpacked and most stuff put away in the house. The service man got the engine running, but his checks showed the battery was now on its last legs, so we bought a new one from him. The old one had been in the car when it was bought in 2012, and I didn’t know how old it was then, so couldn’t really complain.

Quite a few lessons learned today!

Dog oblivious to the dramas…

Just to cap it all off, when I first opened the house, there was a dove flying around inside! It was rather frantic to get out and eventually flew out one of the doors I opened – but not before leaving assorted feathers and other mementoes behind. Judging from those leavings, it had been inside for days and perching mostly on the top rail of the vertical blinds in the family room. Luckily for it, there had been a bowl of dog water in that room. I remembered that I’d arranged for friend M to come last weekend to fill the bird baths, water the pot plants plants and pick herself a good quantity of the figs ripening on our tree. Turned out she;d forgotten to bring a bag for the figs, and used her house key to come in and get one, leaving the house open while she picked fruit. The bird must have decided to explore then and become shut in – four days ago.

I have had better days!


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2018 Travels March 22-29 (2)

MARCH 22-29     HOME TO MARONG AND BACK (2)

We spent our week here exploring the Bendigo region, getting a feel for the areas we might like to live.

Bendigo began as the scene of gold rushes, in the 1850’s. Mining followed the creeks and gullies. Other facilities, such as police encampments, early shops, grew up around the mining areas, in an ad-hoc way. As the nature of the mining changed from the alluvial, easily found shallow gold to the deeper reef embedded gold, so the growing settlement became aligned to the NW-SE trend of the gold bearing reefs. Little “suburbs” emerged, separated by big tracts of mines and huge mullock heaps, amongst them Sailors Gully, California Gully, Long Gully, Ironbark, Golden Square, Kangaroo Flat, Deborah Triangle. Even today, most of the older suburbs of Bendigo have vacant ground between them, occupied by mining heaps and regenerated bushland around old mines.

The suburbs of Bendigo

The central business area of Bendigo grew apiece, north and east of the main mining areas, and with a more orderly layout. The massive wealth generated by gold mining is evidenced by the beautiful, ornate old buildings dating from the later 1800’s, that make the present day city centre so interesting.

In more recent times, there have been some housing estates built on infill sites in some of the older mining suburbs, like Golden Square, but mostly development has simply occurred on the outer fringes and moved progressively outwards, leapfrogging the old waste ground and pockets of State Forest. The effect of this is strangely attractive.

The newer, leafier outer suburbs appealed most. We wanted a modern house, for starters. Although there were housing developments close in, like in Golden Square, our preference was to avoid the areas that might sit on top of old mining tunnels. That was something we both agreed on, along with John’s need for a large shed, and a place to park the Bus.  Beyond that, we differed. John had visions of acreage, fruit trees, chooks, big vegie gardens, no neighbours within cooee. Suburban and manageable featured in my dreams.

That’s MY bed!

During the week we cruised in all directions around Bendigo, drove past some of the properties advertised in the local paper. We were debating whether to buy land and build, or purchase a pre-loved home, so visited a couple of estates and sets of display homes.

We even attended one Open for Inspection in the Maiden Gully suburb. We were the only attendees. I loved the modern, large, light-filled home, but there was only a small shed and no place to park Bus. However, the experience was instructional in that the lady owner was present through the whole time and clearly hampered the presentation of the place by the real estate agent, and made us feel quite self-conscious. After, we resolved that, when our place was being inspected, we would make ourselves totally scarce.

Despite that, we both liked Maiden Gully, which still had a “bushy” feel and where there were frequent sightings of pairs of Eastern Rosellas flying about.

Had a very pleasant meal one evening, with daughter and family, at the nearby Marong Hotel, which did really interesting food. Their Fishermans Basket was very generous – fish, a couple of prawns cooked in charcoal infused panko crumbs, scallops, the tenderest calamari, chips and salad. Delicious and more than I could eat. The pork belly pizza that another member of the group had was innovative, and, apparently, good eating.

One morning there was a really unusual and threatening cloud formation across the sky, not like anything I’d seen before.

Threatening sky over Marong

Eventually, there was a little rain.

Will it rain?

From the park location by the Calder Highway, what really stood out was the sheer volume of truck traffic. The park itself was set far enough back from the road for the traffic noise to be there in the background but not intrusive. At night, from Bus, we had an outlook across a paddock to the highway and the constant procession of lit-up semi trailer trucks. Yet, there was a railway line through Marong to parts north and west. In the week, we neither saw nor heard any rail traffic. This State so needs to re-examine its infrastructure priorities which seem to be almost exclusively focussed on Melbourne and building yet more freeways and tunnels for road traffic.

Overall, the week was useful in firming up some ideas and helping John realize the variety of localities of the city.


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2018 Travels March 22-29 (1)

MARCH 22-29     HOME TO MARONG AND BACK (1)

Set off at 12.30 on a hot and sunny day.

The journey followed our usual route from the eastern suburbs: through Yarra Glen, Yea to Seymour. For once, John negotiated the Yarra Glen roundabouts without taking a wrong exit.

We needed a brief stop at Yea in order to tape shut the fridge door which had yet again opened of its own volition. Really do need to sort out some sort of better fastener for it.

Just after Yea came up behind a Victorian registered Galaxy caravan. One of those drivers who travelled slowly where there were double white lines, then speeded up as soon as there was any possible passing area. He didn’t have decent side mirrors either, so maybe simply drove without taking any notice of what might be behind him.

Lions Park Seymour

A late lunch stop at the Seymour Lions park saw dog disgrace herself, yet again. She has the ability to unerringly find pools of muddy, stagnant water, from a great distance. John’s faith that she will come back when called was again unfounded. Actually, she did come back – eventually. He had let her off the lead to have a ball chase and use up some energy. She took the opportunity to wallow in the only puddle in the otherwise dry creek. Wet, muddy, totally happy, very smelly dog resulted.

Dog in disgrace

The country was very dry. We saw almost no livestock. It had been a long time since there had been useful rain in central Victoria. We would perhaps not be seeing the Bendigo area at its best, but that could be a good thing as dry conditions are more the norm than the rule in those parts.

Dry country

Leaving so late meant that we caught the tail end of the school traffic as we followed the GPS dictated route through Bendigo, which basically just skirted the edge of the CBD. If this was what passed for heavy traffic up here, I’d take it any day. Around Bayswater and Lilydale it would be considered light!

We set up at the Marong Caravan Park where we had stayed before. Marong is kind of an outer suburb of Bendigo these days, with some new housing estates being built.

I had not been able to secure an en-suite site for the whole week, so our first three nights were spent on a very pleasant powered site, actually two sites being treated as one large drive-through site. It was close to the amenity block and the excellent camp kitchen and there was plenty of room for dog on her tether rope. It was relatively easy, after that, to relocate to an en-suite site for the next four nights. Our week cost $264.60, after discount.

On site at Marong

The park was increasingly busy in the lead-up to the Easter break. This provided us with some interesting spectating.

There were several caravans of brands I’d not seen before, including one new-looking off-road style van, predominantly bright orange in colour. It would certainly be hard to discreetly camp in the bush in that one – no blending in with the surroundings. On the other hand, it would be hard to get lost, coming back from the loo in a caravan park…

We watched one caravanner who had to go negotiate a change in site, because he didn’t feel able to back his 24 foot van onto the site he’d been allocated. I thought it was a perfectly adequate site. His next one was not much different and he had to enlist the help of one of the park staff to get onto that.

Another new arrival, onto a drive-through site, cut the corner too finely and his van had a too-close encounter with some tree branches.

Then there was the very new-looking large caravan, with a slide-out extension at the side. The owner obviously wanted to maximize their outside living space, so parked right at the side of his site, before extending his slide-out. It was just bad luck for other park patrons that this then blocked the adjacent path to the central amenities area. Actually, in the dark, there was a real risk of someone walking into it.

Another new arrival got set up, then insisted that park staff prune some branches from a willow tree that was hanging beside his site – immediately!

The travelling public can really be an ugly beast, some of the time.

Watching these various antics over our time here, had me wondering how many would-be travellers visit the caravan shows and select their new treasure, with lots of interior space, all the bling, and no thought to practicalities like towing the damn thing – and fitting it onto park sites?


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2018 March

MARCH

This late-month sojourn away in Bus was somewhat different to our usual travel. Its purpose was to investigate the real estate scene in Bendigo.

We were seriously considering fleeing from “Marvellous Melbourne”. In the parlance: Moving to the Country. Doing a “tree change” – though in our case, more of a tree re-discovery.

Our outer Melbourne home

Even in our outer suburban area, 38kms from the CBD, traffic congestion had become an unpleasant reality. Recently it took me forty minutes to drive the 5kms from home to the centre of Lilydale, at 4.30pm on a weekday. That was now normal. I’d had a medical appointment at Vermont, some 20kms away, at 9.30am. I left home at 8am – and was still late!

The outdoor car park at the Lilydale Marketplace shopping centre now needed commercial traffic controllers at busy times!

The volume of large truck traffic on our local roads was fearsome, and their driving styles often intimidatory.

Our once pleasant Hills street had fallen victim to unit style redevelopment. Blocks of four units were replacing the old homes and their established gardens. These units, in the interests of building cheaply and maximizing profits, provided only one car parking space each. But most owners had two vehicles, so the second one would be parked out in the narrow, dead-end street. Once all the commuters were home in the evening something the size of an ambulance or fire truck would not be able to get through to our end of the street.

Our narrow street

So many large old trees had been felled to make way for housing. Our neighbourhood was pleasant no more.

Daughter had lived in Bendigo for over a decade, and through visiting her family, we had become familiar with the city. Its scale, and the overall manageability of life there had come to seem more and more attractive. It was large enough to have a range of essential services (like a Bunnings store for John) and offer a variety of activities – for that, read several bowls clubs, ditto. The place seemed to have an exciting, dynamic aura these days.

I had been wanting to relocate for a couple of years, now. John had not been interested, until recently. The work of clearing and packing his shed was a significant deterrent to him.

It seemed that now the first part of my challenge had been achieved – getting him keen to move. The second part was to convince him of Bendigo’s desirability as a tree change destination. I knew the area better than he did, so on this trip we would be exploring a variety of suburbs and localities.

Bus had not been refuelled since we were in Lakes Entrance, last year, so John took it off to our local servo where diesel was $1.279cpl.


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2018 Summer

SUMMER 2018

Early in January I watched a very different type of TV program – “slow TV”. This featured a Ghan train trip between Darwin and Adelaide. There was no dialogue. Occasional historic or other features were highlighted by printed captions. Some cameras had been mounted on the train so there was much real time movement. Lasting for three hours, the program was strangely fascinating. I enjoyed it, liked the concept and hoped there would be more.

Having travelled on the Ghan in 2011, much of what was shown on that program was familiar, and why I watched it in the first place. We have not yet managed a trip on the Indian Pacific, across the continent, though it is on the bucket list. Maybe there might be a slow TV feature on this in the future?

With a hot summer, and a swimming pool, we saw quite a bit of the Melbourne grandchildren, son and his wife! John was getting really fed up with maintaining the pool. He rarely used it. I did, when the state of my leg permitted.

 “Cake” I made for grand daughter’s birthday lunch

Son told us of a recent incident, when one of their traffic control vehicles was stolen from the depot by some “ethnic” youths. The onboard GPS tracker enabled the vehicle to be followed, a lot of discarded traffic control gear was retrieved, as was the ute, and the offenders caught and charged. There seemed to be a real increase in various parts of Melbourne, in offences and violence due to these groups. Home invasions seemed to be a regular occurrence, heavily featured in the media. Quite scary.

John’s summer vegie crops were plagued, seemingly, by rats eating a number of the plants, and also the ripening low-down tomatoes. Eventually, the trap he set caught the culprit… not what we were expecting. It was released back into the garden.

Fat and healthy on our vegetables (bluetongue lizard)

The quite ordinary weatherboard house across the street sold for well over $800,000. Clearly, it would be going the way that its neighbour had – demolished, along with the lovely old style garden, four units built in its place. More construction site disruption in the street.

Vallota Lily inherited 32 years ago from my mother

We continued the twice-weekly Skype maths coaching sessions commenced last year with the Bendigo grandson, now in Year 9. Right through primary school, reports had indicated that he was working at the expected standard and that there were no concerns. But in Year 7, it soon became clear that he was a couple of years behind where he should have been in Maths. So we had stepped in to try to bring him closer to standard. When his younger brother started primary school, this year, it was definitely not to the same school his brother had attended!

Oops

Something different in the way of minor disasters…discovering that exploding hard boiled eggs have a far greater impact than one would expect. I had put a couple of eggs on to hard boil for our lunch, went out to pick some salad greens for same, become distracted, then more distracted. Some considerable time later came a couple of loud bangs. Very loud explosions. The sleeping Couey got such a fright that she wet herself! It took me ages to clean fine egg particles from the stove, the walls, cupboard fronts, even the ceiling.

Egg on the ceiling….and on my face, metaphorically speaking