it’s windy and rainy… Winter’s definitely here!

We left Cavendish Rec ground today. It was a good spot, though I’m looking forward to a warm bathroom sometime in the future. We keep coming across these enormous moths in South Australia and Victoria – I’ve never seen ones so big in WA. We found this one in our annexe as we were packing up this morning.














We have been to the large town Hamilton a few times in the last week so we decided to make our way to Warrnambool through the back roads.We saw some beautiful farm land and it was fun! A few tears on my side because I was trying to navigate and it just didn’t work, so in the end Trevor just drove by feel. We ended up in a town called Penhurst. It was quite ghostly but the main street had a bright, inviting sign to the ‘Volcanoes Discovery Centre’. We took a look, and found a treasure trove of information. Penhurst is the home to Mt Rouse which was last active 20 000 odd years ago. It accounts for the number of craters and lakes in the area we are travelling to. South east Victoria is quite a volcanic hotspot we discovered, with a number of dormant volcanoes in the area. We walked to the lookout of Mt Rouse and it was amazing.


 The picture below doesn’t do it justice but gives you some idea of what we were looking at. 


The view was about 270 degrees and seemed to go on forever! This panoramic shot isn’t perfect largely due to the glare and wind which made a good photo hard to take. My back and bottom are on the right…

We found another great campsite tonight at the Warrnambool Showgrounds.  It is $20 a night (more expensive than we’d like) but has a grassed area and playground. The biggest plus is that “the facilities” are those usually used by the greyhound club. This sounds pretty nothingy, but the toilets and showers are modern and are big, have gentle lights, mirrors and proper tiled floors. I really enjoyed my long, hot shower tonight.


We’ve stayed at a few showgrounds now – including Warrnambool, Naracoorte and Cavendish. It seems to work well as they make use of existing facilities and as a result generally aren’t priced too high. There are 6 vans here tonight, so that’s an extra $120 for the Ag Society that they haven’t had to do much for. There was a man who met us who lives here rent free in exchange for collecting fees and showing people where things are. It all just seems to work!