It's All Relative(s).

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We'd  been in  Melbourne for six months, promising all the while to visit Roger's relatives, and never quite got around to it.  With less than a week left to go, the time for drinking tea with relatives was upon us so we collected a local Melbourne relative and jumped on the V-line to Ballarat.

Roger and relative (AKA the Purple Twins) on our purple train.  They were so well camouflaged I kept losing them.
 

The train was gratifyingly fast, overtaking the traffic on the parallel highway and gladdening Roger's  heart all the way to Ballarat where we were met at the station and taken home for a nice cup of tea before heading out to tour Ballarat. We circled the lake and saw the beautiful old buildings in the main street, chucking u-eys with gay abandon as we wended our way back home for lunch.

I must say, had I known the relatives would feed us so well I would have encouraged Roger to visit them sooner. As it was we lingered happily over a sumptuous meal followed by strolling around the back yard meeting bees and a collection of bicycles before heading back to the train.

Well fed.

 Ballarat Railway Station was quite grand.

Grand on the outside...

...and grand on the inside,

with a very impressive floor.

If that wasn't enough excitement for one day, we met BD in the city and had pizza dinner, BD being on a mission to extract as many meals as she can from her parents before we take ourselves off to far horizons and she is left once more alone with her 2-minute noodles and the cat.

Gratuitous photo of the cat.

Two days later we did it all again, jumping on another train to Broadford and having another lovely lunch on the sunlit back patio, watching birds splash in the bird bath nearby.

Bird #1: New Holland Honeyeater.



Bird #2: House Sparrow

Bird #3: Small brown bird that I couldn't positively identify.

We spoke of many things: of grief and loss and family; who had which children and grandchildren and cousins; of bush fires and burst pipes and small country towns.  Before we knew it we were taking goodbye photos and jumping back on the train.

Saying goodbye in a beautiful garden.

 By the time we got home we were really quite worn out by all that socialising and lunching and drinking tea and eating cake so I took the dog for a quick spin around the block in the vain belief that this would make her tired for bedtime, and retired for the night.







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