My daughter, Emma, lives in Daylesford with her fiance, Louise. Em and Lou were hosting our family Christmas at their place, and I'd promised to attend before continuing my travels around Oz. I planned to spend a couple of weeks there, not only to catch up with my girls but also to do some much needed maintenance and cleaning of my red-dust impregnated car and van interior. Seven months on the road, much of which was in the Outback, had rendered the Jeep, in particular, disgusting. I left Jamieson on December 14th arriving in Daylesford late afternoon.
Much of my childhood was spent in Daylesford as my father was a teacher at the local secondary school, so returning to it was very familiar. When I was a kid it was a farming community, an historic old gold mining town and the centre of Victoria's mineral spa country. These days it is very much a tourist destination with upmarket boutique accommodation, shops, galleries, eateries and pubs. It now also has a rather quirky alternative culture and a large portion of the population is gay. It's a truly fun, interesting place.
I parked my van beside Em's house (which is just around the corner from where my family of seven lived in a tiny 3 bedroom house), leaving the roadside nature strips out front free for two more large vans to park when the rest of the crew arrived for Christmas. When they did the street looked a bit like a caravan park!
With a few days up my sleeve I took the time to visit some of my childhood haunts: the gorgeous Botanic Gardens on Wombat Hill, the old lookout, Lake Daylesford and Hepburn Springs.
Christmas with the family was lovely....Santa managed to find everyone, Lou cooked a yummy dinner and the kids had a ball.
With Christmas over I packed up the van and James and l returned to our hometown of Yarrawonga. It felt a bit weird to be back given it was only for a couple of weeks and while l drove by my house that my friend Dot was looking after, I didn't go in and we stayed in the van. Most of the time we spent in the bush beside the Murray just a couple of kilometres out of town, though given Victoria, and in fact a large part of Australia, was being devastated by bushfire l moved to Brian's house nearby on really hot, smoky and windy days.
It was fantastic to catch up with friends, play golf and see all the changes to Yarrawonga. It is developing at a massive rate with retirees, for the most part, moving to the country to get away from the hustle and bustle of city living.
Mid January I took the van back to Daylesford and parked it for a few days while l caught up with more friends and family in the big smoke. Travelling into the Melbourne traffic, noise, graffiti and erratic weather was not fun though once again it was great to see everyone, including my travel companion Karen. She is keen to hit the road again and we made plans to meet up in South Australia in Feb-March and head westward together. It was lovely also to spend a few days with Christine and Greg - and their furbaby Chilli!
I returned to Em and Lou's for a couple of days to ready the van to head west and dumped the two most useless appliances in my van - the TV/wall bracket, and the microwave. With most of my camping unpowered they were rarely used, I can watch TV on my Ipad, and I saved a shitload of space and weight! The microwave space was not pretty to look at with stuff shoved in, so I made an MDF cover, painted it, put a map of Oz on it and velcro'd it in place. It worked a treat!
I said my goodbyes to Em and Lou Wednesday, January 22nd and hit the road once again - hopefully until September.
