The Queen's Birthday

Roo crossing.

While Alison and her friends spent the long holiday weekend in Bendigo inspecting Grace Kelly's wardrobe, on Sunday morning Beau and I sped out beyond the western suburbs to do some geocaching. Beau had identified a tidy string of caches in close proximity to one another in and around the town of Eynesbury, Victoria. According to a sign we passed, it's home to one of the largest remaining grey box forests in the state. Eastern grey kangaroos live here, too, but the weather was too foul for them to be out.

Roadside at Five Ways, VIC

After knocking over a few simple but muddy caches, we stopped to tour Eynesbury itself, a historic town which has been almost completely redeveloped around a golf course. What remains of the original town looks nice; there's an elevated reservoir, and several sturdy blue stone dwellings, a number of which appear to have been adapted for utilitarian use. But the new houses are predictably ugly and flimsy-looking. There was a large site model on display at the sales office that I lingered over, and Beau bought a bag of potato chips at the open but idle convenience store next door. The shop was essentially just a large room that had been set up to sell the bare essentials to desperate townsfolk, and people like us who were driving through and had no other reason to be there. There were perhaps only 80 or so different products for sale, in quantities of only one or two each-- a sleeve of cookies, can of tuna, toothpaste, instant noodles, a tiny jar of mayonnaise, Coke, AA batteries and blister packs of sliced ham. I noted with some amusement that Aeroplane port wine jelly was also among them. Then we walked to the edge of a small lake where Beau rummaged in the bushes and discovered another cache that I had been ready to give up looking for.

The horse from Little River Ripley Reserve

In the rain and chill, that bag of chips had only whetted our appetites, so we crossed to the other side and ate lunch at the golf club, which had been established inside one of larger surviving blue stone buildings-- perhaps a former farm estate-- and expanded with sun rooms and other structural additions. What must have been the entire population of Eynesbury had just come in from the golf course, dripping, and was now placing orders at the counter. Our timing was almost perfect. Beau had a meat pie with chips and salad, and I had a bowl of vegetable soup.

After lunch, we left Eynesbury to find the cache that Beau really cared about-- one in a diabolically lengthy, complicated and far-flung series he'd been following for many weeks. Eventually we pulled into a small parking area off the highway at a place called Little River Ripley Reserve, which consisted of a metal pergola and a decaying picnic table amid a grove of enormous eucalypts that followed the banks of a stream. While I peed on an old grey box, he found the treasure, which included a small plastic horse I decided to keep.

We both had a nice time. I think Beau was disappointed by the rainy weather, but I thought it made for a good adventure. Thanks, Beau!