Bordertown Doesn't Have Motel Biscuits

 We took the roads less travelled from Ballarat to Bordertown, winding up and down and all around through countryside bleached by summer.  Combine harvesters chuntered up and down wheat paddocks and fat bales of hay clustered in the corners waiting to be taken to sheds.  We stopped at Elmhurst Recreation Centre for morning coffee with a backing track of cicadas.

In Elmhurst I could have had a hot shower for the princely sum of $5, paid into the honesty box bolted to the wall of the community hall.  For $10 I could have camped for the night with the added benefits of electricity and a covered picnic table.  Were I a vegetable thief I could have foraged for tomatoes, zucchini, and pumpkin in the community garden.  I'm not a vegetable thief so I didn't do that and besides, the zucchini and tomatoes were all still green.

Elmhurst also had a bell which just asked to be robustly rung, so I complied.

That was fun, wasn't it?

In Stawell we sat outside the Bakery and ate the Best Vanilla Slice in Australia (according to the Stawell Bakery, anyway).  It was pretty good too: I gobbled it all up before I thought to take a photo.  And while I was gobbling the Stawell Town Hall Clock Tower put on a 2-minute show with music while clock-work miners dug and panned for gold and an unseen bell chimed the midday hour.  It wasn't quite the Brugge Belfort, but it was passable entertainment for a sunny Saturday in Stawell.

Murtoa boasted a lake with a little jetty and children splashing happily in the shallows.

Other than the lake not much was happening in Murtoa apart from a teeny tiny water tower museum and some fabulously painted silos. The big old pub in the main street had long shut up shop and was rapidly succumbing to nature.

The Grampians made a cameo appearance as wheatfields whizzed past.

Horsham, far and away the biggest town between Melbourne and Adelaide, couldn't compete with Stawell in the clock tower stakes,

although they made up for it with a metal tower containing the Post Office Bell from the 1880's and a corella figurine on top.  There's a lot of corellas around Horsham.

Mount Arapiles popped up on our left, gateway to the Mt Arapiles-Tooan State Park.

The next stop was Goroke,  which demonstrated enormous civic pride by way of little explanatory plaques on all the old buildings.  There wasn't much going on in Goroke but someone had written jolly New Year messages on all the shop windows, exhorting the tired inhabitants of Goroke to bigger and better things in 2026.

I suspect more than a few bottles of beer made their way under the counter at the Goroke Wine Shanty.

Goroke had fine old doors, too.

Somewhere between Goroke and Frances we crossed the border into South Australia but South Australia was really slack and didn't put up any welcome signs.  We stopped in Frances which had one General Store (closed) and a recreation ground where no-one was recreating.  The playground had a working pump for the purposes of water play though.

From Frances it was but a hop, skip, and an awful lot of bumps on the back road to Bordertown, where the owner of the Bordertown Caravan Park had kindly turned on the air conditioning before our arrival.  There was a kettle, a toaster, the requisite cups and spoons, and itty bitty sachets of tea and coffee.

There's no motel biscuits though.  It's a tragedy.

Home for the night: Bordertown Caravan Park.