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!

The Back of the Pantry

We've postponed grocery shopping for a couple of weeks. For the most part, it's been a beneficial exercise in frugality and resourcefulness. Alison and I don't really go for processed foods, so we don't have deep stores of rations to weed through. But, now and then, it's a good idea to consider the things that sit in the shadowy zones of the pantry, and to see what's still edible among the time capsules in the freezer. Yesterday afternoon I wanted something sweet, and the apples and bananas were long gone. Way in the back of the cupboard, between a jar of clumpy beef bouillon powder and what looked like part of an insect that never achieved infestation status, was this little purple box. When port wine-flavoured jello starts looking like an attractive snack, it's time to go shopping again.

I bought it 7 or 8 months ago because I'd never seen it before, and knew I'd be willing to try it at some point. Today was the day. Aeroplane is the Jell-O of Australia, and, by the way, it's called jelly here. I'm not sure why port wine struck the Aeroplane flavourings team as a good idea. Bertie, the jolly airplane pictured at top right, is clearly meant to appeal to kids, so there seems to be some demographic confusion here.

Flavour-wise, this is nothing like port wine, which is good because I don't like port (evidenced by our collection of dust-and-web-covered bottles given to us by friends). But I don't like this stuff, either; it tastes like weak grape juice filtered through musty carpet padding. Aeroplane offers a few other interesting varieties that I may try in even more desperate times ahead, perhaps when I've run out of syrup of ipecac: blue heaven, "creaming soda", and bubblegum.