Scenic road trip

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Trip Start Jul 06, 2006 Previous
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  Albury/Kilmore, Australia
Monday, February 12, 2007

We took the scenic route from Canberra to Melbourne, driving through Kosciuszko (dont ask me to pronounce that) National Park and the twisty turny roads of the Snowy Mountains - not at all snowy in february of course, but still undeniably beautiful. They are part of the Great Dividing Range containing Australia's highest peak, which we think we identified! It was rather odd to drive through ski resorts, like the town of Jindabyne, which had a completely alpine feel to it - ski hire/sallopette shops, ski slopes and lifts etc etc...only completely green, warm and sunny!! come back in winter and I'm sure it would be a different story. We stayed that night just inside New South Wales, in Albury, a cute little town on the Murray River, where we found a lovely campsite, with swimming pool and BBQ - luxury!

Next morning we left bright and early and crossed the border into Victoria and headed towards Melbourne, stopping off firstly at Glenrowen - where the infamous Ned Kelly had his final stand. The town is less than 1km long, on one road and there are about 20 or so buidings, each one of them dedicated to Ned Kelly in some way, with statues of the much-loved criminal dotted about the place. We went to a couple tiny museums with random Kelly artefacts and a 'mechanically animated cinema' depicting the life of Ned! It was completely built and run by an eccentric 60 yr old man whose dream it had been to produce this mechanical animation about Ned, and included the final shoot out, Ned's hanging, his family and a few songs thrown in for fun - we loved it! We then tried to look for some kind of market in which to buy some salad for lunch.....no go - you're fine if you want a Ned Kelly pencil case, but if it's a lettuce you're after, you're pretty stuffed...

Onwards along the highway to the Yarra valley, where the wineries are abundant. Being the intelligent girl that I am (ah-hem), i had offered to drive all morning, leaving Sian behind the wheel for the afternoon and me to freely sample as many different wines as possible - woo hoo! So 3 wineries and 20-odd samples later we left the yarra valley with 6 new bottles of various colours/years/types of wine both with and without bubbles and went to Kilmore, where we spent the night at Garratt's new pad - a good friend we'd met in Darwin. He is so considerate, he even helped us drink a few of our new bottles of wine....

  

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