Ballarat, Victoria: We are taking a holiday weekend in the town of Ballarat, just over an hour west of Melbourne. Ballarat was at the heart of the Australian gold rush in the 1850’s. Tomorrow we plan to visit Sovereign Hill, a living-history museum similar in nature to the Genesee Country Museum, near Rochester. We also hope to do some bike riding, but are concerned that the trails we’ve read about are more suited to mountain bikes, not road bikes, which is what we ride. We’ll check into that tomorrow and if we find that the trails are too rough for a road bike, we’ll probably put some miles in on some back roads.
When we planned this weekend excursion, we hoped to be able to take our bikes, but were unsure of how they would fit in the car. With very little trouble we were able to put down the back seats and remove the trunk (boot) cover and there was plenty of room for our bikes and a couple of suitcases. We are pleased to know that we can travel so easily with our bikes.
On our drive here today, we saw the signs saying “Kangaroos-Next 5 K”. I was driving so Jim was on the look out and sure enough, sharing a large field with some cows, were about 50 kangaroos!!! We got a great view of them! A bit further along the road we saw a “Koala” sign, but had no sightings! Our kangaroo sighting was helped by the fact that it was dusk as we were driving, prime spotting time.
All the arrangements for our move to a larger apartment have been finalized and it will happen on Monday. It shouldn’t take too long to for me to move our stuff, especially with the help of an elevator!
No pictures in this shorter blog entry because the Internet in our room at this Ballarat hotel is weak. We will have to take this computer to the outside walkway to get a connection to post this entry!
G’Day Mates!
Southern Crossings 2013 