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capn_n_pyeDid you hear the one about the two Aussies and the Scot who got a bus to Niagara Falls? Turns out that they keep meeting in odd parts of the world, and this time it’s Graeme the Scot’s turn to visit Australia. It’s rather unfortunate, really, as every time Graeme leaves his country it causes deaths. Like Princess Di. And the Columbine Massacre. That’s right – Graeme killed the Pope, and can quite possibly claim responsibility for Prince Rainer, a helicopter disaster and a rash of other things we haven’t noticed yet. And his disaster-spree is due to go on for about three weeks! So herein is a looooooonnnngg epistle, just like in the days of yore.
Graeme’s visiting us for two weeks (it’s school holidays at the moment, so we’re not making him come to school to sit in the corner of the room and be yelled at when he gets the year 7s into trouble), so we’ve become maniacal tourists. To help keep up the image of Australia as a place of sunshine, it was 30 degrees on the Saturday we picked him up from the station. We would have gone to the airport, but that would have meant getting up at about 3am, then driving off the road in a stupor. So we made it a reasonable 7am instead! Knowing that the flight takes forever and he probably hadn’t slept in sixty hours, we pumped Graeme full of caffeine and headed down the Bellarine Peninsula. At Barwon Heads we found a place where they rehabilitate wildlife so that tourists can molest them, so Caroline got to glare suspiciously at the wombats, Julia got to yell back at the screaming cockatoos and Graeme got to laugh at an echidna that was trying to dig through corrugated iron (it kept almost falling over backwards). We all got to pat a wallaby and koala, too! Though we warily gave the pissed-off looking emus wide berth.
We had fish and chips on the beach at Queenscliff, a bit of a swim and Caroline climbed a bit of a cliff to get a cactus cutting. Same old, same old! To top it all off, we introduced Graeme to two very important things – beer and The Castle. Now he can say “How’s the serenity?!” with the best (or worst) of us!
Operating on the theory that If You Don’t Stop You Won’t Notice The Jetlag, the next day we took off to Ballarat to visit Sovereign Hill. For those not in the know, Sovereign Hill is a Historical Park that is all colonial-gold rush-fun, and proves to all those ignorant furreniers that Australia really wasn’t populated just by convicts (not that Graeme was ignorant, of course). It’s got lots of re-created late-19th century shops, a school, bowling alley, gold mine and also a Chinese ‘village’ where you can pan for gold. Jen and Belinda (henceforth referred to as Jenski and Belrog) came along too, and after some clever juggling of public transport to get them there with us, we were enjoying tocheesiness educationalness of it all.
Caroline and Graeme got trapped (by Jenski) watching a crappy pantomime (where a man in love with a lady named Chastity Belle declared “I would not give up my Chastity for any dog!”) before we all stood around to watch an old bloke demonstrate how to load a musket. We were actually behaving ourselves quite well, but he must have noticed our broad and wicked grins when he started going on about the ramrod. Stupid old duffer asked what we were smiling at, so Julia was forced to point out that he had said ‘ramrod’ and we are all immature. For some reason it took him a little bit to see the connection. Anyhoo, we got him to hold Moose, went shopping for a ye olde police truncheon and went up to the school house to practise writing with nib pens. It was there that the old bloke with the musket found us again. He really didn’t have anything to say, but seemed to want to talk, so he picked up our writing to read it out loud. The first one he read was Caroline’s, where she’d started writing lines of ‘I will not laugh at the word ‘ramrod’. Then he found Belrog’s, which read something like ‘I am Belrogski! I will rule the world with my truncheon of destiny, all will cower before me, shiver at your doom!’ That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close enough to show that he was a bit surprised and seemed quite eager to leave us alone after that.
To escape from silly old buggers, we went down their gold mine which was great - they now end the tour with a ride on a little train, which is always good! Jenski had invested in a teeny weeny little gold pan for Moose, so then we went to the river to pan for gold (little bugger should start to earn his keep!). His attention span was too short to keep going for very long, but Jenski kindly found a tiny speck of gold for him to keep. Bless her!
Sovereign Hill closes at 5pm, so when they released the dogs (okay, so when a small terrier ran past – maybe the pantomime guy was going to give up his Chastity after all...), we went to investigate the Eureka Stockade Centre. It was closed, so we couldn’t educate Graeme about Australia’s early unionist movement, but we were able to play in one of the best children’s playgrounds we’ve seen in a long time.
Then, in order to round it all out, we went to a pub to introduce Graeme to VB before going home. We could choose not to mention the later road-side stop consequences of having a few pots before a drive, but people taking it in turns to stumble around in the dark trying to find a suitable tree is funny. And Julia heroically resisted the urge to bugger off in the car while they were doing so!
The next day we hung about in Geelong for a while before climbing the You Yangs (our version of mountains, which we’ve always thought resemble Sesame Street’s Mr Snuffaluffagus lying on his tummy). We raced up to Flinders Peak, the highest point, which is where Early Explorer Matthew Flinders climbed to in order to survey the bay.
That whetted our appetites for a lunch of meat pie and sauce. Graeme had a Four & Twenty pie, which is Right and Good, and he then was able to cross that culinary delight from his list, before we pushed on to Somers. We’d decided on a good old fashioned barbeque for tea, but hadn’t really thought through the timing much. We cleverly gathered our wood for the fire while it was still light (freaking Graeme out a bit – he doesn’t have to worry about snakes and spiders back home), but then we went for a walk. This meant that by the time the fire was ready to cook on, it was dark. Undaunted, we stuck damper on the end of sticks (bush tucker!) to varying degrees of success. Graeme’s fell off into the fire quite soon (or was thrown – he’s cunning) and Caroline’s was going swimmingly until her stick caught fire and quietly burned through. Julia turned out to be a damper savant, as hers worked perfectly! Having checked our snags by candle-light we fed well, then watched 70s horror films and had beer until we fell asleep.
When we woke up, we popped down the road to Phillip Island, timing it so we’d get to San Remo in time to watch a man with a bucket throw fish at pelicans on the beach (every day they feed the marvellous birds, who hang around looking smug).
Phillip Island has ripped off a lot of names from the Isle of Wight, and just like when we went there, we had the most wonderfully perfect weather - clear, blue skies, not too hot and no wind. We popped down to Cape Woolamai in search of surfers, but none were to be found - just roiling ocean and impressive cliffs flanking the long, empty beach. Oh well! Next, we zoomed across to the tip of the island to visit the Nobbies. As we pulled into the car park, we had to avoid running over a snake quietly sunning itself on the road. It was brown, with a yellow belly, so we decided to assume it was a Yellow-Bellied Brown Snake (although actual research suggests it was probably a Copperhead). Access to some of the board walks down the great lava-formed rocks at the Nobbies was restricted because of breeding birds. We thought that was fine, until we found out it was Silver Gulls which were getting it on. OTHERWISE KNOWN AS SEA GULLS! Fie on stupid abundant rats-with-wings!! We still got some lovely views, luckily, so they were spared an enraged rampage.
After lunch we visited the Koala Centre, where they have a boardwalk up in the trees so you can get very close to the lazy little beggars. Because it was warm, some of the younger ones were quite active, and Moose watched intently for one to lose its fuzzy koala grip and fall, but though it came close, it never did (don’t want to know what he intended to do with it once he got his hands on it).
We had a hour or so spare then before the penguin parade, so took in a round of Crazy Golf. Then we joined the throngs sitting on cold concrete grandstands waiting for the Penguins Formerly Known As Fairy to arrive.
For some reason their name has been changed from Fairy Penguins to Little Penguins, which just seems naff to us. A saucy seal did laps and surfed waves to entertain us as the sun slowly set and the temperature quickly dropped. Moulting season is just about finished, so penguin numbers are down apparently, which explains why it took about an hour for more than one to emerge. Some of the shifty little beggars ran back into the ocean four times before getting enough nerve to scuttle up the beach and totter up into the dunes! Eventually quite a few appeared and we got to watch them stagger along beside the boardwalks in the dunes, as they shouted at each other in Penguin. We got right into it, and so did Moose...
Our quota of Australian wildlife for the day filled, we had a very nice pub meal in San Remo before going home to Somers. We expected to see possums at some point, too, but that was not to be.
Wednesday saw lovely weather again, so we showed Graeme how to play cross-country bocce (or boules) on the beach, complete with hazards like some dog which kept trying to eat the jack. Being a movie-buff, Graeme had to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock, which always takes longer than it has a right to! Incidentally, they mention Bournemouth in it – never noticed that before! We went down the road to Willow Creek winery for a spot of wine tasting, which kinda ended up being a wine watching, as it turns out Graeme’s not actually fond of wine and Julia had to drive. Caroline got to have fun, though! The vicissitudes of being a tour guide. We’d decided to get the Sorrento-Queenscliff ferry (rather that doing two hours of boring freeway driving), which gave us the opportunity to visit Point Nepean. We did some lovely walks, and went up a hill to look down on the beach where the Russians/Chinese/CIA snatched Prime Minister Harold Holt when he went to show off how well he could swim, all those years ago. There is a Harold Holt memorial there somewhere, but the stupid useless map they give you hid it, so we never actually found it, darn it. Maybe if we’d looked all day we’d’ve discovered it, but they were shutting the park, so we went to the ferry terminal expecting to miss the ferry. Imagine our surprise when we made it with 30 seconds to spare! We had a great, smooth crossing, with the sun setting picturesquely. We had more wild life sightings, too - five of Julia’s students showed up, but they were much less interesting than the dolphins who bounced about and showed off beside the ferry.
We had a bit of a lay-day next, and took in a couple of DVDs, a pleasant lunch on Geelong’s water front, and spent about twenty minutes seeing the sights of Geelong’s CBD. Yep. We streched it out to twenty whole minutes!
Friday was a big day, which started with typically unpredictable Melbourne weather – rain, followed by a gorgeous summery day. We did what absolutely ALL tourists to Melbourne should do, which is to go to lunch with D’admiral (and Chuckles and Chris, of course). We decided that the odds of Graeme never having had Yum Cha before were pretty good, so we went to the Shark Fin Inn (eventually. Shark Fin House were very nice and said that even though we didn’t have a booking there, we were welcome to stay!). He was very brave and tried most things, letting only a few things go past (tripe, tentacles and chicken feet among them). Full of yummy food and wine we wandered about the city, and went to Queen Victoria market, where Stinky promptly bought half a dozen cacti. Graeme kindly spread his tourist dollar around a bit and invested in an Akubra hat, and Pye got a shiny, pretty wallet, so that was time well spent. We rode the city circle tram for a bit, showed Graeme to best hot chocolate in the world (in the Victoria Centre), and finished up at the pub. Jenski and Belrog were only an hour and a half late, and Cath showed up precisely when she said she would, so it was a typical Friday night! When we finished all the Coopers they had on tap we got the train back to Geelong. A poor showing by V-line, we’re afraid - Spencer Street is still being chronically re-furbished and tried to hide the platform from us. That wasn’t V-line’s fault, but the fact they planned for just one Sprinter carriage on a night that they knew Geelong was playing footy in Melbourne certainly was their fault! Oh well, we made it home without anyone vomiting on us, so considered the journey a success.
The weekend saw Graeme packed off to Melbourne on his own, so we two poor working slobs could try and get some work done – all those people who go on and on about teachers’ holidays just don’t know how much teaching-junk we end up doing in the holidays!
Graeme’s visiting us for two weeks (it’s school holidays at the moment, so we’re not making him come to school to sit in the corner of the room and be yelled at when he gets the year 7s into trouble), so we’ve become maniacal tourists. To help keep up the image of Australia as a place of sunshine, it was 30 degrees on the Saturday we picked him up from the station. We would have gone to the airport, but that would have meant getting up at about 3am, then driving off the road in a stupor. So we made it a reasonable 7am instead! Knowing that the flight takes forever and he probably hadn’t slept in sixty hours, we pumped Graeme full of caffeine and headed down the Bellarine Peninsula. At Barwon Heads we found a place where they rehabilitate wildlife so that tourists can molest them, so Caroline got to glare suspiciously at the wombats, Julia got to yell back at the screaming cockatoos and Graeme got to laugh at an echidna that was trying to dig through corrugated iron (it kept almost falling over backwards). We all got to pat a wallaby and koala, too! Though we warily gave the pissed-off looking emus wide berth.
We had fish and chips on the beach at Queenscliff, a bit of a swim and Caroline climbed a bit of a cliff to get a cactus cutting. Same old, same old! To top it all off, we introduced Graeme to two very important things – beer and The Castle. Now he can say “How’s the serenity?!” with the best (or worst) of us!
Operating on the theory that If You Don’t Stop You Won’t Notice The Jetlag, the next day we took off to Ballarat to visit Sovereign Hill. For those not in the know, Sovereign Hill is a Historical Park that is all colonial-gold rush-fun, and proves to all those ignorant furreniers that Australia really wasn’t populated just by convicts (not that Graeme was ignorant, of course). It’s got lots of re-created late-19th century shops, a school, bowling alley, gold mine and also a Chinese ‘village’ where you can pan for gold. Jen and Belinda (henceforth referred to as Jenski and Belrog) came along too, and after some clever juggling of public transport to get them there with us, we were enjoying to
Caroline and Graeme got trapped (by Jenski) watching a crappy pantomime (where a man in love with a lady named Chastity Belle declared “I would not give up my Chastity for any dog!”) before we all stood around to watch an old bloke demonstrate how to load a musket. We were actually behaving ourselves quite well, but he must have noticed our broad and wicked grins when he started going on about the ramrod. Stupid old duffer asked what we were smiling at, so Julia was forced to point out that he had said ‘ramrod’ and we are all immature. For some reason it took him a little bit to see the connection. Anyhoo, we got him to hold Moose, went shopping for a ye olde police truncheon and went up to the school house to practise writing with nib pens. It was there that the old bloke with the musket found us again. He really didn’t have anything to say, but seemed to want to talk, so he picked up our writing to read it out loud. The first one he read was Caroline’s, where she’d started writing lines of ‘I will not laugh at the word ‘ramrod’. Then he found Belrog’s, which read something like ‘I am Belrogski! I will rule the world with my truncheon of destiny, all will cower before me, shiver at your doom!’ That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close enough to show that he was a bit surprised and seemed quite eager to leave us alone after that.
To escape from silly old buggers, we went down their gold mine which was great - they now end the tour with a ride on a little train, which is always good! Jenski had invested in a teeny weeny little gold pan for Moose, so then we went to the river to pan for gold (little bugger should start to earn his keep!). His attention span was too short to keep going for very long, but Jenski kindly found a tiny speck of gold for him to keep. Bless her!
Sovereign Hill closes at 5pm, so when they released the dogs (okay, so when a small terrier ran past – maybe the pantomime guy was going to give up his Chastity after all...), we went to investigate the Eureka Stockade Centre. It was closed, so we couldn’t educate Graeme about Australia’s early unionist movement, but we were able to play in one of the best children’s playgrounds we’ve seen in a long time.
Then, in order to round it all out, we went to a pub to introduce Graeme to VB before going home. We could choose not to mention the later road-side stop consequences of having a few pots before a drive, but people taking it in turns to stumble around in the dark trying to find a suitable tree is funny. And Julia heroically resisted the urge to bugger off in the car while they were doing so!
The next day we hung about in Geelong for a while before climbing the You Yangs (our version of mountains, which we’ve always thought resemble Sesame Street’s Mr Snuffaluffagus lying on his tummy). We raced up to Flinders Peak, the highest point, which is where Early Explorer Matthew Flinders climbed to in order to survey the bay.
That whetted our appetites for a lunch of meat pie and sauce. Graeme had a Four & Twenty pie, which is Right and Good, and he then was able to cross that culinary delight from his list, before we pushed on to Somers. We’d decided on a good old fashioned barbeque for tea, but hadn’t really thought through the timing much. We cleverly gathered our wood for the fire while it was still light (freaking Graeme out a bit – he doesn’t have to worry about snakes and spiders back home), but then we went for a walk. This meant that by the time the fire was ready to cook on, it was dark. Undaunted, we stuck damper on the end of sticks (bush tucker!) to varying degrees of success. Graeme’s fell off into the fire quite soon (or was thrown – he’s cunning) and Caroline’s was going swimmingly until her stick caught fire and quietly burned through. Julia turned out to be a damper savant, as hers worked perfectly! Having checked our snags by candle-light we fed well, then watched 70s horror films and had beer until we fell asleep.
When we woke up, we popped down the road to Phillip Island, timing it so we’d get to San Remo in time to watch a man with a bucket throw fish at pelicans on the beach (every day they feed the marvellous birds, who hang around looking smug).
Phillip Island has ripped off a lot of names from the Isle of Wight, and just like when we went there, we had the most wonderfully perfect weather - clear, blue skies, not too hot and no wind. We popped down to Cape Woolamai in search of surfers, but none were to be found - just roiling ocean and impressive cliffs flanking the long, empty beach. Oh well! Next, we zoomed across to the tip of the island to visit the Nobbies. As we pulled into the car park, we had to avoid running over a snake quietly sunning itself on the road. It was brown, with a yellow belly, so we decided to assume it was a Yellow-Bellied Brown Snake (although actual research suggests it was probably a Copperhead). Access to some of the board walks down the great lava-formed rocks at the Nobbies was restricted because of breeding birds. We thought that was fine, until we found out it was Silver Gulls which were getting it on. OTHERWISE KNOWN AS SEA GULLS! Fie on stupid abundant rats-with-wings!! We still got some lovely views, luckily, so they were spared an enraged rampage.
After lunch we visited the Koala Centre, where they have a boardwalk up in the trees so you can get very close to the lazy little beggars. Because it was warm, some of the younger ones were quite active, and Moose watched intently for one to lose its fuzzy koala grip and fall, but though it came close, it never did (don’t want to know what he intended to do with it once he got his hands on it).
We had a hour or so spare then before the penguin parade, so took in a round of Crazy Golf. Then we joined the throngs sitting on cold concrete grandstands waiting for the Penguins Formerly Known As Fairy to arrive.
For some reason their name has been changed from Fairy Penguins to Little Penguins, which just seems naff to us. A saucy seal did laps and surfed waves to entertain us as the sun slowly set and the temperature quickly dropped. Moulting season is just about finished, so penguin numbers are down apparently, which explains why it took about an hour for more than one to emerge. Some of the shifty little beggars ran back into the ocean four times before getting enough nerve to scuttle up the beach and totter up into the dunes! Eventually quite a few appeared and we got to watch them stagger along beside the boardwalks in the dunes, as they shouted at each other in Penguin. We got right into it, and so did Moose...
Our quota of Australian wildlife for the day filled, we had a very nice pub meal in San Remo before going home to Somers. We expected to see possums at some point, too, but that was not to be.
Wednesday saw lovely weather again, so we showed Graeme how to play cross-country bocce (or boules) on the beach, complete with hazards like some dog which kept trying to eat the jack. Being a movie-buff, Graeme had to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock, which always takes longer than it has a right to! Incidentally, they mention Bournemouth in it – never noticed that before! We went down the road to Willow Creek winery for a spot of wine tasting, which kinda ended up being a wine watching, as it turns out Graeme’s not actually fond of wine and Julia had to drive. Caroline got to have fun, though! The vicissitudes of being a tour guide. We’d decided to get the Sorrento-Queenscliff ferry (rather that doing two hours of boring freeway driving), which gave us the opportunity to visit Point Nepean. We did some lovely walks, and went up a hill to look down on the beach where the Russians/Chinese/CIA snatched Prime Minister Harold Holt when he went to show off how well he could swim, all those years ago. There is a Harold Holt memorial there somewhere, but the stupid useless map they give you hid it, so we never actually found it, darn it. Maybe if we’d looked all day we’d’ve discovered it, but they were shutting the park, so we went to the ferry terminal expecting to miss the ferry. Imagine our surprise when we made it with 30 seconds to spare! We had a great, smooth crossing, with the sun setting picturesquely. We had more wild life sightings, too - five of Julia’s students showed up, but they were much less interesting than the dolphins who bounced about and showed off beside the ferry.
We had a bit of a lay-day next, and took in a couple of DVDs, a pleasant lunch on Geelong’s water front, and spent about twenty minutes seeing the sights of Geelong’s CBD. Yep. We streched it out to twenty whole minutes!
Friday was a big day, which started with typically unpredictable Melbourne weather – rain, followed by a gorgeous summery day. We did what absolutely ALL tourists to Melbourne should do, which is to go to lunch with D’admiral (and Chuckles and Chris, of course). We decided that the odds of Graeme never having had Yum Cha before were pretty good, so we went to the Shark Fin Inn (eventually. Shark Fin House were very nice and said that even though we didn’t have a booking there, we were welcome to stay!). He was very brave and tried most things, letting only a few things go past (tripe, tentacles and chicken feet among them). Full of yummy food and wine we wandered about the city, and went to Queen Victoria market, where Stinky promptly bought half a dozen cacti. Graeme kindly spread his tourist dollar around a bit and invested in an Akubra hat, and Pye got a shiny, pretty wallet, so that was time well spent. We rode the city circle tram for a bit, showed Graeme to best hot chocolate in the world (in the Victoria Centre), and finished up at the pub. Jenski and Belrog were only an hour and a half late, and Cath showed up precisely when she said she would, so it was a typical Friday night! When we finished all the Coopers they had on tap we got the train back to Geelong. A poor showing by V-line, we’re afraid - Spencer Street is still being chronically re-furbished and tried to hide the platform from us. That wasn’t V-line’s fault, but the fact they planned for just one Sprinter carriage on a night that they knew Geelong was playing footy in Melbourne certainly was their fault! Oh well, we made it home without anyone vomiting on us, so considered the journey a success.
The weekend saw Graeme packed off to Melbourne on his own, so we two poor working slobs could try and get some work done – all those people who go on and on about teachers’ holidays just don’t know how much teaching-junk we end up doing in the holidays!
Lunch Bookings
Date: 2005-04-12 05:35 am (UTC)