09/04/2022 Formula One Woes: Melbourne

-

 

The Formula One Grand Prix is on in Melbourne after a two year hiatus due to plague, and all the fans are there to celebrate the end of their Grand Prix drought.  Not only are all the old fans here but there's mobs of new ones too, thanks to everyone binge watching Formula One on Netflix during lock down and then heading out to see the live action while it's in town.  They clog up the motels and jam up the traffic, which was why on my first night in Melbourne I put the tent up on a skerrick of grass grudgingly ceded to me in a Caravan Park.  There was literally nowhere else to stay in Melbourne apart from some very functional bridges and a bench or two.

I started the day in Ararat with a spot of sight seeing at the One Tree Hill lookout.  T'was a tad hazy and the clouds were low and heavy, which all added to the spectacular view.  Two wedge tail eagles played lazily in the updraft and a sleepy kangaroo sat and looked at me as if saying 'Good  Morning!'






I wasn't in a rush, so I set good old Maps to avoid highways and meandered happily up hill and down dale, eventually being  rewarded with another beautiful view of the city rising out of the haze in the distance.

My kind of road.


The road side is littered with dried out thistles.

Of course I then forgot to allow the nice Google lady to take me on highways again, and endured a torturous wander through endless suburbs in search of a public toilet until I realised my mistake and, with the press of button, was summarily spat back out onto a highway and could make a bee line for the nearest service station.  Alas I then had to justify my use of the amenities by buying coffee and a vanilla slice which, being a nice person, was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

This soulless service station had a teapot collection behind the coffee counter.  Which just goes to show that you can find a teapot aficionado just about anywhere, even at a terrible cafe in a service station on the Western Freeway.

I was the only tent camper at the Sundowner Caravan Park so I had the patch of thick green grass, four benches, and the entire camp kitchen to myself for the entirety of my stay.  My only complaint was that there were no books in the laundry as I was quite excited about doing swapsies and picking up some new ones.  I was reduced to perusing the instructions for the washing machines which was not quite as relaxing as the real thing and certainly couldn't be done whilst snuggled up in a sleeping bag.

Home for the night: Sundowner Caravan Park, Melbourne.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

23/12/21 The Dinosaurs of Newtown

-
Image
Some time in the months before Christmas, somewhere near Newtown, a shop had a sale of inflatable Christmas dinosaurs. Lots of people thought that a large inflatable dinosaur was just what they needed for their 2021 outdoor festive decor, so they bought the dinosaurs and then discovered that, once inflated, they were very big. Not as big as a real dinosaur would have been, obviously, but certainly big enough to be inconvenient if you happen to live in a trendy little terrace house with a handkerchief of front lawn and second story verandah almost the size of half a vegemite sandwich.   Dinosaur #1: taking up all the available verandah space I imagine that at this stage the dinosaur purchasers may have considered the size of the dinosaur (inflated or otherwise) in relation to their rubbish bin, but were likely prevented from this course of action by children who, enamoured of dinosaurs, had welcomed the creature into the Christmas fold and called it something festive like Rudolph, o...
Read more

Minor Adventures on Quiet Days

-
Image
 Roger took himself off on the train to South Australia for a week, so BD and I decided to have some adventures of our own, albeit not as exciting as riding the interstate train to Adelaide and getting to have an up-close stickybeak at the flooded Murray River. We took ourselves off to the Ormond Lookout to watch the sun set instead. As did rather more people than what we had anticipated. Mobs, in fact. We found a patch of dirt grass and settled in.  "I'm gonna come back here!" declared BD.  She wriggled around a bit: our patch of grass was on quite a slope and she kept sliding out of her shorts.  "With a chair," she added. In between admiring other people's dogs and taking observational lessons in 101 Ways To Take A Selfie, we watched the sun trundle slowly toward the horizon. No sunset is complete without a picnic. There she goes. Further down the beach, a container ship puttered across the horizon under the gaze of a lone beach-sitter.  And us, of course...
Read more

Quiet Life with Cat

-
Image
 After all the excitement of hospital stays, Emergency Department visits, and trying to balance the cost-benefit ratio of hospital cafeteria food, life became a little more settled.  After a week of blessedly boring drug levels BD was given a reprieve from daily blood tests and we, therefore, were released from daily drives to the nearest Melbourne Pathology lab.  We did some laundry and did some cleaning and I hopped on my bicycle and went for a ride or two.  Not that the weather was very conducive to enjoyable and relaxing bike riding, but I went anyway. All was fine at Albert Park, where the swans put on a good show, playing happy families all across the playing fields.  But that didn't last for long. Back at home the new cat let his crazy out to play.  He zoomed up and down the hallway in the middle of the night; scared the bejeebers out of us by jumping on the sound bar and blasting us with high volume TV; hid under chairs and batted at our ankles as w...
Read more