Views from the road:
This was our long driving day, so we had to keep on truckin' past lots of places we would have liked to stop and see and get on to Beechworth, where we were booked for a ghost tour in an abandoned asylum, and then to sleep in another part of the asylum that had been converted into a hotel. When we arrived in Beechworth at 8:00 p.m., we found that their Celtic Festival was in full swing, and that's the only reason that we could get dinner so late. Lucky us. We went straight to our hotel and checked in so that we could get to the ghost tour by 9. I don't know how much of the information our guide gave us was true, but it sure was creepy. And I took some pictures that I know the ghost hunters group in Chicago would have been excited about.
See the orb?
This theater was one of the nicer parts of the asylum, where patients were allowed to sing and be dressed in normal clothes. You can see lots of happy little orbs in this picture:
Our guide was very good at creating a spooky mood, and he'd usually get everyone really scared, and then someone would interrupt him and say, "Hey look! There's an opossum out there." He started threatening to channel Steve Irwin and even that didn't get people to quit looking for opossums instead of ghosts.
After the tour of the abandoned parts, our hotel really didn't feel so creepy anymore, even though on the way to our room we passed two giant steel doors that used to be used to lock in the patients.
The next morning we ate breakfast and then headed into town to see the courthouse where Ned Kelly was held and/or tried on various occasions, and also to find some antihistamines because ever since we'd entered the interior of the country, my face had been melting from hay fever. Turns out the hardest thing to find in rural Australia is a pharmacy open for more than an hour in the morning on a Sunday.
We drove from Beechworth to Glenrowan, site of Ned Kelly's final clash with police, and we arrived just in time for the annual Ned Kelly Festival, complete with a reenactment of the siege, yabbie races, BBQ, whip cracking demos, and all that good small town festival stuff. But first we had to go to the amazing animatronic Ned Kelly attraction, Ned Kelly's Last Stand, which was the real reason we came to Glenrowan at all.
Warning for Ned Kelly's Last Stand:
Ned Kelly's Last Stand is phenomenally awful robotic show about the last days of Ned Kelly. We talked to the 75 year old guy who built it afterwards, and he told us it's taken him 30 years. He's still not done. He was really fun to talk to, and in between shamelessly hitting on me and showing us his Viagra prescription, he gave us a tour of his house and explained why he's completely unapologetic when his attraction makes children cry. In his mind, he's presented history as is actually was, and he's not going to change it for anyone. Nor does he see any contradiction between presenting it "exactly as it was" and basing large parts of the script on "Gunfight at the OK Corral" and "High Noon."
Inside Ned Kelly's Last Stand:
An actor in full Ned Kelly armor at the festival reenactment:
We had to tear ourselves away from Glenrowan because we still had 3 or 4 hours to drive to get to the Mornington Peninsula.
As a footnote to this day, we also made it a day of trying food that we can get in the U.S. for the sake of comparison. McDonalds is exactly the same, but the fries are actually better (maybe they still use beef tallow in Oz?), but Mexican food is a complete abomination. The bar in the Mexican place had more whiskey than tequila, and that just means they had both Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. The margaritas came from a soft serve machine (and tasted like the inside of the machine) and the glasses were rimmed with iodized table salt. The food was probably what you'd get if someone described Mexican food to a cook who had never been anywhere near Mexico or even a Taco Bell. Oddly enough, the place was called Taco Bill. We shoulda known better.
I was very happy to get to Mornington and back to the coast, where my eyes could finally stop watering and I could go 5 minutes without sneezing. We had our terrible Mexican food and then walked on the beach and back to the hotel. The next day we drove out to Montalto Vineyards for a wine tasting. It was a perfect day to be out driving through the hills.
Montalto's vineyards:
We bought half a case of wine, and headed back toward the coast of Port Phillip Bay for lunch at a place that sources all their ingredients from the peninsula, and it was a really amazing meal. I had a leek and bleu cheese tart that came with roasted eggp
lant and zucchini and other veggies, and Scotty had the ocean trout which was also delicious, but I won lunch. We hung around at the garden surrounding the restaurant for a little while, and then started up toward Melbourne to meet a friend of Scotty's.
Crazy huge flowers in the restaurant's garden:
View over the Bay:
I'll get to Melbourne next post.
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