A couple of months ago, after the passing of my dear Dad at the grand old age of 100, I headed out for some R & R, choosing the Grampians.
Three hours north-west of Melbourne, the Grampians is a series of rugged sandstone mountain ranges and forests. It’s one of Victoria’s most popular holiday destinations for camping, climbing, scenic drives and bushwalking.
With Christmas over, not to mention 2020, it was time to start exploring again. I headed north of Melbourne to the old gold-mining town of Castlemaine.
Continue reading “Old Gold-mining Town of Castlemaine”I’ve been seeing photos of artwork on wheat silos for ages and decided it was time I saw the real thing, and so I headed for Benalla in Victoria’s north-east, and to the three little towns of Goorambat, Devenish and St. James.
I had decided that after my week in Cornwall I would head back to London via Canterbury. Penzance to Canterbury by train is a seven hour trip so I wanted to break it up somewhere along the way. I chose Chichester, mainly because of its famous theatre.
It was my fault, even after all the trains and buses I’d used in the last fortnight, that I still thought I would get on a train at Penzance and get off, relaxed and rested, at Chichester. Actually it took over six hours and three different trains.
One of my very favourite authors is Susan Howatch. Susan wrote a series of novels based around the Church of England and its clergy, and having lived and studied in Salisbury, set the stories there, calling it Starbridge.
I had discovered while researching my trip to the UK that just 14 miles out of Cambridge was Ely, famous for its cathedral, and where Oliver Cromwell lived for ten years of his life.
The bus took an hour and a quarter to get there, the consequence of stopping at every local bus stop along the way but I had a good look at the suburbs of Cambridge and the surrounding countryside, and watched the locals coming and going, noticing the change in their accents the further away from Cambridge we got.
On my second day in Oxford, I was wandering alongside the old city wall when I came upon a set of heavy wooden doors, a smaller door cut out and open, the same as mine at Balliol College. It seemed an odd place for them, surrounded by nothing but high stone walls, and I had to investigate where they could lead. Peering through, I saw a pointed arch, framing an emerald green lawn, turretted buildings rising behind. A sign said Welcome to New College.
While preparing for my upcoming trip to England, my mind wandered back to my first trip in 2011.
I’d always wanted to slip, ‘when I was at Oxford’, into the conversation, and so I booked myself into Balliol College, the oldest university in the city.
On my way to a matinee at the Melbourne Theatre Company, I hopped a tram up St. Kilda Road to the Shrine of Remembrance, to try out my new camera. The Shrine sits on a hill in the Royal Botanic Gardens.
After my serious dose of nature in Sherbrooke Forest, and my communing with my first-ever lyre bird, I headed up the Tourist Road to Mt. Dandenong and the William Ricketts Sanctuary.
Continue reading “William Ricketts Sanctuary Dandenong Ranges Melbourne”
Planning to the Nth 