Country Victoria is as dry as a bone........

My SIL invited me to travel down to country Victoria yesterday to keep her company on the long drive.  It was a spur of the moment invitation and I guess I wouldn’t have gone to the beach the day before, if I’d known that a long country drive was on the agenda.  We had a couple of breaks on the long 150kilometre trip to Colac (thank goodness), so we could both stretch & get some fresh air.  We both have bad backs and without those breaks, I’m sure we would have been struggling to walk or straighten up at our destination.

I took a number of images out of the car window as we were travelling down the highway at 100 kms per hour, and understandably, they are not in perfect focus, but at least you can see how dry our state is at the moment and why we are besieged by bush fires.  Gosh, February is our hottest month, so the worst of the bush fire season is yet to come.  I believe you can see the bush fire smoke over the eastern side of Australia, from outer space.

I’ve never attempted to take photos out of a car window travelling this fast.

Still had the polarizing lens on the DSLR from the previous short trip to the beach, so between the sun film on the passenger window and the polarizing lens, there were some very vivid colours in the sky in some of the images – I should have remembered to take that lens off and let the natural sky colour appear in all my photos.  In some areas, the countryside was so flat with no hills, mountains or anything much on the horizon and I had this weird sensation of being on the edge of the world and about to drive off into empty space.

Where I live in the inner city, there are always hills or mountains in the distance, let alone power lines, train lines or city skyline.

The next couple of shots were taken at the second rest stop - Winchelsea, a very old grazing and farming community first settled in the late 1830s.  We just stopped at the local picnic ground and walked around for 5-10 minutes, but I would have loved to wander around and look at some of the old homes that abound in the area if we’d had more time.  But with my SIL doing the driving which probably amounted to about 6 hours from her home on the eastern side of Melbourne, we didn’t want to delay too long on route.  Fortunately, the old wagons & bluestone cottage nearby were shot while I was stationary - not in the moving car – such an interesting old town.

Colac, our destination, 150kms south-west of Melbourne, was full of old turn-of-the-century cottages and amazing churches, but I’m afraid I wasn’t up to a walk around them to take photos.   So after a lovely lunch spent with a delightful couple related to my SIL, we took a very short walk down the end of the street, entered the town/city’s Botanical Gardens overlooking an enormous lake, took a couple of photos and headed back to the house, got in the car and headed back towards Melbourne.

The second ‘rest & stretch stop’ on the way home was at the large city of Geelong where we sat overlooking Port Phillip Bay eating yummy hot chips as the sky started to change colour and darken as the sun went down.  A long drive for me (who was the passenger – not the driver – LOL), but still a lovely change from my normal inner city life.  My SIL is excellent company too, so we were able to gossip most of the way.

Everywhere along the docks, restaurants & parkland next to the water in Geelong, there were these amazing wooden life-size ‘totem pole’ type painted statues of people.  They were so delightful and unexpected.  I wonder who painted & created them?

Looks like another Google search is needed.

What would we do without the internet………

And last, but not least, the sun hitting a particularly long pier and some buildings towards the end of it.  At least the sky is the correct colour in this shot.

 

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Tags: countryside, fields, flowers, gardens, old wagons, pier, sea

• January 21, 2013
• Buildings, Landscapes
• 15 comments