Man I was tired last night: tired and frustrated by slow internet, so I'll ask forgiveness for the brief, irritable blog last night.
We woke to sprinkling rain this morning but it never amounted to much more than a nuisance. Straight forward pack up and move on with the van attached through the night.
There was relief from the stinking hot weather of the first three days of the trip, for with clouds rolling across the sky and acting as a filter all day, we saw little sun. Good! Today was the shortest of four days drive to reach our staging area in Geelong but the early signs were it was going to be a busy one on the main artery south. With Victorian schools opening on Tuesday, the last of the family holiday traffic was flooding back to suburbia. There were lots of high performance truck/utes, some with vans, some with boats, all with the attitude that I should get the hell out of their way. By the turnoff to Seymour, I was sick of the high speed traffic and morons cutting in too close. Even a stop at one of the many very well laid out highway rest stops turned into a competition when to utes fenced me in. I just waited until Moron One left and made my way back onto the highway.
Given the volume of traffic, it raised the concern of a bumper to bumper bottle neck on the Highway, somewhere closer to Melbourne so we bailed and took the scenic route. At Broadford, we took the off ramp and then stopped for lunch at a lovely little War Memorial park, just across the road from the Historical Society and it's plethora of buildings caught in Australian white history time capsule.
From there it was south east to Kilmore, which included a Google Maps special which took us through a section of corrugated gravel road, followed by a new housing estate. Another piece of GM genius wanted to send us on a shortcut to avoid Lancefield. The gravel surface and sign "Local Traffic Only" discouraged me. South to Romsey and beyond and then the road numbers changed more frequently than the navigator was happy with and by now she was sure we would end up in Adelaide.
While other traffic kept heading back towards Melbourne, we tracked through high country of Lerderberg State Park, mostly at 60km/hr thanks to the local council having a cautionary 60k zone that went on and on like Malcolm Turnbull avoiding a question from Leigh Sales. We eventually descended down onto the coastal plain and Bacchus Marsh and the rest was easy. Our added no kms to the journey, took a little longer but remained stress free.
No photos today.
Girding our loins tomorrow in preparation for the swim to Tassie on Tuesday.
320 @ 12.87 km/100 L (1334 @ 11.91 km/100 L)
Lancefield , Romsey and Bachuss Marsh was a path our group travelled in December. I am sure we travelled on the same “Local Traffic Only” road. Through the village is much nicer.
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