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.