Finches Country Guesthouse Beechworth

... and another peak bagged! And in keeping with my experiences to date I saw the usual selection of fashion clothing being warn up the hill and that most disgusting and ubiquitous of Australian footwear – the flip flop. Yes I know its called a thong here but that name just turns my stomach even more. What, you may wonder, do I have against the humble flip flop? Nothing actually – my problem is with what is fails to ...

Can't believe how early we had to get up this morning - 3:30am NZ time (which is 1:30am Aus time) to get to the airport.
But it was all good. Watched the Twilight movie on the plane on the way home and now i cant wait to see New Moon!

Coming through customs in Australia was funny as i had to go in the high security line due to my Maouri souviner that i brough back with me that is classified as a weapon. I was just glad that Border Security wasnt there to film me haha.

... mission one night, looking to see some, no success again.. We stayed at a caravan park, we were 12 people and worked hard (at least most of the time, some of us..), longer hours than in metro area, more sales – I did 18 services which was the second best result of the week, made $1300! – and obviously had heaps of fun! It was a great team, we all got along really well and grew together to a little family.

Back in ...

... for the uninitiated - dress warm when you sleep on a lilo in Beechworth - we froze the first night and didn't get a great sleep at all :s

I was nervous leading up to the AUDAX ride this morning. For everyone else there, this was to be a fun short social ride through Beechworth gorge and surrounds. For me, 37.5km was the furthest I'd ever ridden in one go, and despite my fitness improving since I started building up the days I ride to work and doing weights training ...

... a lovely night,also with some cake,milo's,and a movie! In the morning we packed down the caravan and headed to the main street.We went to 'The Famous Beechworth Bakery'(as mum calls it) to have lunch.After a few minutes dad carried on and did a bit of drawings.Mum, Marc and I went to the Beechworth Honey shop.The three of us went on a tour at the shop.We also bought a jar of Grey Ironbark.At the end we wondered around the town and headed to a new place

... diesel, because these can easily be converted to run on vegetable oil and thus be all nice and environmentally friendly.)
The meeting had a very strange ending, though, as one of the ladies had asked for my email address to continue the vegetable oil discussion, then suddenly changed her mind and didn't seem to want to know me after I mentioned that I disapproved of the brand of coffee they bought because it came from coffee growers who were oppressed with poor work conditions ...

... organised churches (or perhaps only on a very rare occasion), yet I still feel an urge to go visiting churches on Sundays. It is not a religious obligation I feel, as I meet with God quite adequately in parks and forests and while having conversations with injured magpies, so perhaps it is only that I am longing for human company.
There must be somewhere else I can go to meet more sincere, more interested folks than the organised churches. Perhaps I should start hanging out in pubs...

... of a magnificent stone wall and a ha-ha (a ditch with one sloping side and one vertical side into which is built a retaining wall) normally used for livestock but in this instant presumably to keep the patients in and the public out. I wonder how many students have scaled it! The trees here are magnificent, and most of them are labelled. There are large mature London planes, cedars, English elms and oaks as well as various eucalypts, Liquid Ambers, cypress ...

... 27 times and survived. Only to be captured while trying to run away and then hanged a few days later. Corollary: it is not easy to run from the police when carrying a 90 kg suit of armor. While Ned's life story sounds a lot like the good old Robin Hood's, the guy leading the tour did a really good job making the history come alive and had a few interesting insights into Ned's career, too. We found particularly interesting that, while Ned had only a ...

... From Canberra we headed down to Beechworth. Now, most people likely have not heard of this jem of a town but we headed there as another gapper from Camp Stephens lives there, Peter O'Toole. Peter's father owns one of Australia's most famous bakeries, The Beechworth Bakery (it has 6 locations!). Tom O'Toole (Peter's father) has become something of a legend at Stephens. He is also a insprirational speaker and has books, cookbooks, cd's and dvd's to his ...