Not a series of old rock songs but the road home.
We packed up expeditiously and drove out of the hotel (with little drama fitting through the car park entrance this time) at 0750. There was a little excitement on getting to the street as a brown bomber was giving out pickets just down the road: but he didn't pay any attention to us. (Which probably means he got a high score in the "Self-preservation" section of the selection test.)
No need to involve Sheila on the way out of town as it is very simple: Right turn onto Victoria St, drive 300m and right turn on to Exhibition St. Going down the first 500m of Batman Ave, offer up a prayer that we are not running up that slope (on a parallel road) at the start of the Melbourne Marathon.
On, on to the Wild East. The most surprising thing about this image is how little traffic was coming towards us. Normally that road is 3 lanes full doing 20kph. Also note the gloomy looking sky.
The sky became a little more active very shortly. We drove through weather like this for most of the next 100 km.
By the time we got to Traralgon the rain had stopped and we swapped drivers. As we didn't like the number of traffic lights in Sale I fired up Polly from Google Maps on my phone to guide us around on its usual short cut. I was very surprised to find Maffra (or, as the gmail spell checker suggested, Mafia) in our future. In this screen grab I have shown the approximate bypass route, as usually presented, in red. No idea why it took the wider route.
The area around Maffra seems to be very much a dairy farming area. I suspect it was all selections rather than squatting, so
Dad and Dave would be well at home here.
Maffra seemed a far nicer town than I expected - I thought it a mining town like Moe or Morwell - and this old pub was very attractive
Back on the Princes Highway insanity rules. Not the other drivers who were by and large well behaved but these gooses subjecting us to 40kph when they are working on a lane well separated by Armco. (Rural Roads Victoria is very fond of Armco out here: I assume someone's brother-in-law had a large shed full of railings they needed to shift.)
We made a grocery stop in Bruthen. Bull Ant Brewery had bottled off a brew of Piano Bridge Stout, which I had sampled from the tap on the way up. It wasn't labelled but a 6 pack was acquired (and a sample quality tested in the evening - excellent it was).
We were both feeling knackered, and I seemed to be developing a cold, so didn't swing into Gipsy Point to hunt for the Brown Cuckoo-Dove. I think we got home at about 1415, so 6.5 hours.
Cold still evident the next morning so a RAT was taken with a negative result.
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