Bendigo and surrounds

Monday, 1 April 2013

We're in Bendigo for the Australian Easter 3-day Orienteering Championships, which finished today.  We've done pretty well. The kids made it through their courses unscathed and emerged with giant easter bunnies for their efforts, Jon made enough navigational mistakes to negate his awesome fitness at the moment but still managed to finish 4th in a tough class, and I held onto 2nd by the skin of my teeth today, finishing behind my good buddy Clare who I would  never beat anyway - so I'm pretty happy with that - in fact today I ran as fast and hard as I possibly could (without actually training)  and I'm shocked that my ankle and brain actually held up! yay.  My brother Paul even managed 2nd in an almost-as-tough class (mens 45-50) which given his decrepit state at the moment is impressive. In fact a competitor of his remarked that he looked so bad as he ran around his course on day 1 that he didn't think he would actually finish!  

As we will be taking the kids out of school for the rest of the week (so we can make the most of our expensive boat-fares) we thought we should undertake some cultural learning in our free-time. Failing that we sent them down the gold mines (in the hope they could retrieve gold to pay for our expensive boat-fares)..  It turned out to be more of the learning experience than the lucrative pursuit we were hoping for but nethertheless it was really good.  We felt like we were a long way underground but in fact we were only on level 2 (60 metres below) of a 16 level mine. Gosh. 

The kids got to use some of the mine machinery and we got to see what it would be like working there both in the gold-rush days, and in modern times so it was pretty cool.  

We have found that after orienteering the kids are more than happy just to watch a dvd or play endless games of hide-and-seek with their buddies so the rest of our afternoons have been pretty cruisy with time to fit in a bike ride.  For Jon this means seeking out challenging climbs and descents, for me it meant the rail trail!

Orienteering friend Owen and I rode the 20k (each way) rail trail from Bendigo to Axedale on a track that looked pretty much like this all the way.. 

Which wasn't exactly amazing, but we did go past lots of old stations (it was an old passenger line for the people of the gold fields) that looked like this..

and we passed through the odd interesting feature that looked like this..

Tomorrow we will head back to Melbourne via Woodend for a few nights at Paul and Danni's place before we head to the alpine country for a few nights.