Volcanoes, churches and more gold!
After a really lovely stay in The Grampians it was time to move on to the next spot. Not too far – less than a couple of hours down the road to Mt Franklin, 10 minutes north of Daylesford.
Mt Franklin is another free campground inside an extinct volcano. It was quite interesting to drive up the side and into it and find yourself in a fantastic tree-lined crater. We’ve learned that with free camping it’s best to turn up on a week day, and it’s best to turn up early so we did both of those things and got a really nice shady spot. It’s a good thing too because this place is really popular, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights, but also on the Monday night we happened to be there when a few “young people” turned up, set up next to us and had a party until around 3am.
Anyway, the main reasons for being there were to explore the neighbouring towns which are all lovely and old with beautiful old buildings and churches, and to visit Ballarat, which I haven’t been to for a very long time.
The surrounding towns were quite interesting – we knocked off a few of them (Daylesford, Trentham, Kyneton, Mount Macedon, Castlemaine, Creswick and Clunes to name a few). An interesting feature of almost all of them were a selection of churches built around the 1850-70’s – really impressive, large churches made of local bluestone – and lots of them too, in some cases four or five in a street.
We mostly just wandered the streets in these towns checking out the old buildings. Clunes was particularly interesting as it has an entire main street preserved almost as you’d expect it to have been in the mid to late 1800’s. In fact it is often used in movies and tv shows because of it.
We managed to get up into the Macedon Ranges, into the bits that were dog friendly (which to be fair was a lot of it). Right at the top there was a huge cross which was a memorial to fallen soldiers in the wars. It had been rebuilt out of concrete after the original one burned down in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. You could just imagine how the whole place would have gone up with the amount of vegetation there and the ruggedness of the landscape.
The highlight of this week for me though had to be our trip to Sovereign Hill in Ballarat. This is basically a theme park, dedicated to all things related to gold mining and life in 19th century Ballarat and surrounds. There were a lot of demonstrations, of which we saw almost all of them which I think helped to bring the history to life for the kids. Some of the best ones were the confectionary demonstration where they made some toffee, the gold pour where we saw them making a $270,000 gold bar, and the underground mine tour. It was just me and kids on this one as Jim opted to stay with the dog, and run around Ballarat doing all the chores (fixing stuff basically).
The day at Sovereign Hill was supposed to be our last day in the Daylesford region, but as we’d been subjected to the “young people party” the day before, we decided to stay another day and enjoy a sleep in and a quiet time around the camp.
Next stop is another free camp called Hammond’s Road, just out of Airey’s Inlet, at the start of the Great Ocean Road. Just a heads up – I’m not going to write about that as I spent most of it dealing with the mountain of work I had while juggling bad internet – not a very interesting story to read… Except I will say that we went into Geelong for the day and had a lovely lunch on the waterfront – mussels in white wine and parsley sauce for me!
