Day One – The Road to the Great Ocean Road – Dec 27th

There’s quite some distance between Sydney and Melbourne not exactly one you’d
want to drive in a day… So it behooves one to find a place to stop on the way.
We did.
Shoe has relatives at Jindabyne, an alpine town that was reborn during the building the Snowy River project. Do you know the Snowy River? It’s a rather ambitions hydro electric power project based in Australia’s only alpine region (I know, alps, in Australia, who’d have thought?!).
It is ironic that even getting to Jindabyne was not without its stories. The drive to Jindabyne from Sydney takes in Goulburn and then Canberra and in all probably took around 5 hours to complete.
Goulburn is a country town and hub or much of the rural populace of that area. It reminds me a little of some of the towns in NZ in terms of what’s available and the feel of the place. One of the icons of road travel is lunch at the Paragon Café. “Here you go luv. pie and chips” and who are we to balk at such a trend…

The pie and chips filled the gap as did a visit to the local Sanity record store where we did what we could to augment our listening pleasure for the long stretches of driving and to bolster the local economy with our hard earned cash.
Goulburn’s other claim to fame is the ‘Big Merino’ a nod to the prosperity gained at that great breed’s indignity (well, have you ever seen a shorn sheep? Poor nekkid wee things…) as you can see, he’s a little shy and takes advantage of road furniture to preserve his identity.

On the way out of town we hit a rather impressive hailstorm. (A hailstorm – welcome to summer in Australia…) and so we had to park the car on the side of the road and ride it out there was certainly no driving through it. Visibility was dreadful and actually, the hailstones weren’t exactly small… it wasn’t until we stopped in Jindabyne that we could check that there wasn’t any damage done to the car. Bit of a relief as the Golf is new and damage so early in its tenure would have been rather upsetting to its ever-loving owner.

At the mercy of the weather gods…

Ground Cover.
As we got higher in altitude on the road between Canberra (we didn’t stop there… seen it… got the t-shirt) much of the pasture took on a purple hue… that swathe in the middle of the picture is actually purple… sorry dodgy camera phone shot!!! I had to ask once we reached our destination what it was… apparently it’s called Patterson’s Curse and is safe pasture for cows but does horses a terrible disservice… Good to know for when I’m ever grazing horses…

Anyway, we finally made it to Jindabyne in the early evening and our hosts couldn’t have been more hospitable. For their blog-safety let’s just call them Mr. and Mrs. Goodtime… Barbeque dinner on the balcony overlooking lake Jindabyne… didn’t I mention Jindabyne had a lake?? Oh… it’s all part of that Snowy River Scheme apparently the town got flooded out when the lake ‘went in’ mad crazy things these power schemes do…

The view from the Goodtime Estate…