Best Western Ballarat Suites

... deliver the gold to the bank and earn about life as a soldier, pus just about other mining info and life in the "olden" or "golden" days. We all had a try at panning for gold with a little bit of luck - nothing that is going to make us wealthy - but we all had a little fun. We then treated ourselves and went out for a very late by the time it arrived meal at Hogs Breath Cafe. Jeremy's meal was worth the wait - the rest were still good as I didn't have to cook it! More rain!

... thousand and has the widest streets we have ever seen. It has it's fair share of monuments and historical buildings some dating back to the early 1850's. The very next day was spent at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens which is situated along side Lake Wendoree, which is a lake no more due to the drought. The best it had to offer were the rows of the largest Redwood Trees planted in Australia, some were 40m in height and with a girth of 18m, it was an awsome sight ...

... mail coach (yep even Jim) ,then we went to church and met a real preacher on his day off - hymn for the day was no. 666 ! nattie got dressed up (jim didnt) and lots of photos got taken! everyone else had gone home long before us - thanks to the rain we had the place to ourselves pretty much! we learn today that the welcome stranger, as well as being the name of our ...

... money for Proclaim.. she asks if I'm going I say no .. its a donation for Fiji. She says she don't take donations thats next door... strike 2. (Early in the week I wanted to donate 10 dollars but the girl I went to said she doesn't take it accounts dose.. clearly she didn't know who did and assumed it was Maureen.) So besides that I got my change and then she asks me if I have made arrangements with someone about paying my bill for staying... I said yes.. I asked ...

... this lovely girl from the UK named Donna. After chatting about it the last few days, we've decided to hire a car on Monday morning (when I get back from Bendigo) and take a road trip on the Great Ocean Road!! It's a bit rushed (we will only have till Wed morn because she is flying out to New Zealand.. but if all goes well, we will be on the road Monday and Tuesday and just sleep in the car the two nights.. (Let's see how that goes!)

... habe. Und ja, ob ich Basketball spiele ist auch gefragt worden...seufz. Through Chinatown and onward to the goal. The Chinatown gates I did not find very impressive. I think the Boston ones are much nicer, but I like the lanterns. Nifty, no? Durch Chinatown und weiter zum Gefängnis. Die Chinatown Tore fand ich nicht so toll. Die in Boston sind schöner, aber die Laternen, die finde ich klasse. At the Melbourne goal I opted out of getting arrested and locked up (every ...

... and the car finally died on the gates into the caravan park, never to be started again! so we sold it the next day to a scrap man for $50! only got it for $850 so not too bad, so we worked on a plan of action the next day - we were meant to be leaving! anyway the following day we hired a car for 3 days to travel to the NSW border and then back to Melbourne and on to Adelaide. To collect the car we had to get to Thrifty in the city centre which involved a hike off 3 ...

... sorry I didn't take my camera) After a small amount of time there we decided to go home as we had a day of girly pampering planned for the next day. So in Auckland when you decide its time to go home, you can usually find at least 4 taxis parked at every corner, sadly it is far from that here. After spending over half an hour trying to hail a taxi , we finally saw one pulling over for us.success. If that was true my following tale would finish here...but it doesn't...the ...

... The main reason for visiting the island is the Penguins, every evening when the sun goes down approximately 2000 little penguins waddle back up the beach after a long day fishing. The penguins were very cute but it was so cold on the beach that we didn't wait for all 2000 to arrive. On the way back to Melbourne we called in to the farm so that Paul and Savanna could meet the parents, after a very short tour of the shack we were living and the ...

... the pinnacle and guaranteed to give us an amazing view across the grampians and surrounding plains. This was our first adventurous trek since Machu Picchu and the agony of sciatica. We dusted off our hiking boots, stocked up on water and spent the first few minutes trying to decide which path we should be taking! Still not convinced we set off and after 600m we realised we had come the long way around extending our trek to 4.8km. We admit it felt good to be trekking agin ...