There’s gold in them thar hills!

It’s possible we’ve arrived a little late for the gold rush, but it didn’t stop us having a look just in case.

We’ve been staying in a tiny little town called Lockington, 25 minutes from Echuca and 50 minutes from Bendigo. We’re effectively staying in a paddock, even though we are right in the centre of town. It’s free (gotta love a free camp) but has everything we could possibly need including a flock of corellas that fly in every night and some cracking sunsets.

Our stay here has coincided with some pretty strange weather – pushing 30 degrees for the first couple of days, then a cold Antarctic wind came through so we all whipped out our winter gear again for the next couple of days. It’s passed on through now and we’re back to more regular Victorian summer weather which seems to be nice sunny days and cool nights.

First we headed north to Echuca – a very old inland port town on the banks of the mighty Murray River. It’s also a particularly dog-friendly town so Jett enjoyed a trip on a paddle steamer up and down the river, then a visit to the Port museum and even the gift shop! Cudos for Echuca for recognising that dogs are people too (well not really, but it’s useful to be able to bring him along to these things).

We also had a bit of a poke around the town and I found a bookshop where I could have spent the family fortune, but then would have had to buy another trailer to cart it all around so I settled on three books (and as it turned out, none of them were for me). The kids are voracious readers and we’re struggling to keep up with their speed reading. We’re anti-devices too (I’ve had too many years working with optometry clients writing about kids, myopia, and screen time), so we’re avoiding the kindles and sticking to good old-fashioned paper books. Not an insurmountable issue, just requires a bit more effort.

Anyway, Echuca is a nice little town, and it was a novelty to pop over the border to NSW too, for the first time since we passed through there in September. The Murray River is in NSW, with the border being on the Victorian riverbank. Annoying if you want to fish in it because you need a NSW fishing licence despite having your feet firmly on Victorian terra firma.  We’ve got a couple more weeks of following the Murray to come so we’ll pick up a licence and see how we go.

Bendigo is the other town of note in the region and is also jam-packed full of history, built on the back of the gold rush in the mid-1800’s. Also dog friendly, we did the tourist tram through the city which Jett (and his other doggy travelling mates) enjoyed. You can hop on and off all day, but as the timetable is infrequent, we just went for the ride and only got off once, in the centre of town to have some lunch. As usual, we were also hunting around for supplies to fix stuff, this time a new strut for the back canopy. No joy with that, so it’s going on the long list of stuff that we’re going to order online and get delivered to us later down the line.

We headed back to Bendigo for a second day to visit the Central Deborah gold mine. Funnily enough despite all Jim’s years working in and around mining he’s never been in an underground mine so we decided to do the tour (I’ve been underground before, in the salt mines in Poland). Only the above-ground stuff there is dog-friendly, so we took turns this time to don our hardhats and descend the 61 metres underground to level 2 of the 10-level mine. It was a pretty interesting tour, and Heidi was picked out to yell “fire in the hole” and push the explosives button on her tour with Jim (luckily the explosives had been replaced with lights and the sound of explosions, not the real deal).

We also tried to visit the cathedral which is enormous, but annoyingly it was shut for a wedding. Not sure who was getting married but they must have lot of friends – you can fit hundreds in there I’m sure.

We’re about to finish up our time here in Lockington and head further west along the Murray River, first to Swan Hill then Mildura. Hopefully the cold snap in the weather was an anomaly and we can get back to a bit of summer sunshine. When you live outside the weather plays a big part in your day-to-day existence, and we’re all much happier when the sun is shining.