After an exhausting few days tramping across some of the most beautiful country you could wish for, we spent our last night at the Bright Brewery👍, before staggering off to bed.  Preparing to leave the next day, our Melbourne-bound fellow travellers were quickly on the bus and away, while we hitched up, had coffee, thanked our footpath benefactors and departed without hitting anything.

Not hitting things was about to become an important part of our travels.  There was a toss-up between heading for Policeman’s Paddock near Rutherglen (strongly promoted by Simon from Inspirations) or trying our chances at the random free camps along Reedy Creek near Beechworth (equally strongly promoted by Helen at the Bright turismo).  Of course, we chose the random approach.

Beechworth is a pretty town full of lovely old buildings from gold rush days.  We grabbed a coffee at the best café in town judging by the crowd (Project 49👍) and some more detailed directions to a potential campsite.  We quickly passed the entrance exam at the information centre:  Do you have an off-road caravan? Yes ☑ Do you have dog? No ☑. 

Now, armed with a sketchy map, we drove hopelessly around in circles on dirt roads for an hour or so before eventually finding a campsite near enough to the creek.  Many of the WikiCamps reviews of these many sites warned of the rough and narrow tracks in and so we had to get out and walk into each potential spot and determine whether we were clever and/or brave enough to get ATGANI in and more importantly, back out.  The one  we finally chose was as tight as we could ever manage but with Lesley guiding the way, we wove our huge caravan through trees and rocks to eventually park it in a semi-flat space about 30m from the creek.  Most importantly, yet again we didn’t hit anything.  Not perfect but not bad either. 

A couple of hot days here saw us test out our new generator which was, unusually, a complete success and so we were even able to run the air-conditioning!  The heat also didn’t encourage us to have a campfire.  This was lucky, because while the Parks Victoria website is full of dire warnings about obeying the fire instructions, it stays resolutely silent on what those instructions might be.  We eventually found some moderately comprehensible guidelines on the CFA site, so at least we now know where to look.  Perfectly ridiculous! 👎👎

With about 5 days to go until our next rendezvous in Bendigo (The Lost Trades Fair – I’ll tell you about it later!), we parked ourselves happily in the Euroa CP, right beside the river and with plenty of space around us.  Good facilities and a good location meant we stayed on here a couple of extra nights before driving straight through to Bendigo.  Dinner at the walking distance Seven Creeks pub 👍👎 was not nearly as good as a riverside barbie at the van with Mike McGorman who was travelling through to Philip Island for a classic car meeting.

Benalla was within easy striking distance and it had a Silo Art Trail – irresistible.  We drove through obviously prosperous pastoral and agricultural areas, stopping at Goorambat, Devenish, St James and Tungamah and were mightily impressed by the painted silos in each town.  A picture is worth…so here are some…

Sadly, we missed a trick by not exploring Benalla itself on foot, because it turns out there are dozens, maybe hundreds of murals in the town.  They’re all the result of a brilliant initiative called Wall to Wall which runs annually (Covid excepted, of course) and sees all sorts of artists decorating pretty much any wall space that stays still long enough to be painted.  Some of the paintings disappear quite quickly, others hang around for years and even get touched up.  The silo art is an offshoot where local towns have cleverly joined in by commissioning various artists to decorate the huge concrete and metal silos which mark their townships, even though most silos are now out of service.

It was easy to see how this general idea has taken root and been expanded – we were particularly delighted by the public toilets in the tiny town of Goorambat. 

Additionally, St James had a great looking art deco hotel, perfect for us in our future career as publicans – apparently, not part of Lesley’s plan.

She was more excited about the Anglican Church, also in Goorambat, which looks perfect for our “converted church in the country” future project.  It had the two key attributes needed.  It’s made of wood, so it can be cut in half and moved.  It’s owned by the Anglicans who are probably in the steepest decline, so it may become available yet!

And so, we set fair for Somerville Park, our farmstay destination 20km outside Bendigo, ready for the Lost Trades Fair where I had high hopes of learning how to do something useful, like make an axe or operate a cross-cut saw.  What could possibly go wrong?