Mount Gambier, Portland, Home

We woke up to a day that was still cold and damp, the ground was wet from heavy rain during the night. We booked out of our motel and headed up to the Crater Lakes Lookout to see the lakes that Mount Gambier are famous for, particularly the Blue Lake which is the biggest. We were not expecting to see a particularly blue colour because we had read that the time of year when it is bluest is between October and March but we were pleasantly surprised since the lake as you can see is still blue but apparently not as bright a blue as at that time of the year. We didn’t spend long up there looking since it was absolutely freezing! The wind was so icy and there was a little rain trying to come down also. The Blue Lake is Mount Gambier’s water supply and has a surface area of 70 hectares, a depth of 70 metres, a circumference of 5 kilometres and a volume of 36,000 million litres. The Blue Lake was formed by a volcanic eruption depositing ash and rock. After the eruptions, the groundwater was restored forming the lake. The other three lakes in descending order of size are the Valley Lake, Brownes Lake and Leg of Mutton Lake. You can drive around to each lookout and view them and there are also walks you can do or organized surface tours but that was definitely not going to happen today! You get quite a good view of the town from the lookout also and realize it is quite a big place.
We headed off next toward Portland on our last day of this big adventure noticing all the pine plantations on the way and the logging trucks and mills; I guess we’ve got to get our toilet paper and tissues from somewhere don’t we? At least these days, it comes from plantations and not old growth forests like it used to. There are huge plantations of varying aged pines and there are trucks constantly loading up with logs of timber to transport to the mills. We stopped at Portland next to have morning tea and have a quick look at the place; my brother-in-law Rod hails from Portland and we had never seen it or had any idea what it was like so it was good to take a look however fleeting. Unfortunately it was wet, cold and windy while we were there too and we were pretty keen to get home so we didn’t spend much time there. It has a Maritime Discovery Centre which informs visitors about Portland’s maritime history; it might have been worth a look if we had more time. There are at least 18 shipwrecks around the Portland area, all of which are documented at the Maritime Discovery Centre. We saw the port from town with what looked like woodchips in big piles waiting to be loaded, a big ship, and storage facilities etc. It seems like a busy port! The coffee shop we chose was busy and as a result took quite a while to get our coffees which was annoying since we really wanted to keep moving today and get home in reasonable time.
This was not to be since shortly after leaving Portland, just past a town called Yambuk which is 20 km from Port Fairy, there was a bad accident involving two cars and a van. When we got there the police had stopped traffic both ways,, there was a fire truck and an ambulance was picking up injured people. It was at a T-intersection with the road going off to our right and we are not sure what happened except that one car had only frontal damage, one was damaged both back an front and the van parked up further had damage all down the driver’s side. It took a while to get the area cleaned up so we could get around; meantime another two CFA units arrived on the scene from neighbouring towns. When we were able to drive around the accident site and past the traffic stopped on the other side of the road, it was quite a line of cars and trucks with drivers wondering what was going on. Hopefully the road was cleared fairly quickly because there was a lot of traffic heading that way from Port Fairy direction. We stopped at Port Fairy for lunch and just as we got out of the car the heavens opened with, first rain and then hail! We leapt the huge puddles at the side of the road and made our way to another slow serving cafe. I suppose there’s no hurry in the country.
Finally back on the road; me still driving since Portland and it rained bucket loads the whole time with a long line of cars driving as fast as they dared but no one over taking – thank goodness! We nearly became a statistic ourselves as a tanker driver decided he didn’t need to give way to me as he entered the highway from the left side but could just plough on through. I braked hard, fearing that the car behind would not be able to match it and be in my boot before I knew it. Looking in the rear vision, I saw that he had managed to slow enough to avoid hitting us. Phew!
When Fin took the wheel later on it had almost stopped raining and did stop for the rest of the trip really but we had been slowed by all the factors mentioned and so sent Tris a message saying 6pm looked more like our ETA at this stage. The run into Melbourne wasn’t too bad with most of the traffic probably trying to get out of town instead of in so that was good. It was a strange feeling, seeing the city and thinking about how we had driven into so many towns and cities and looked compared them to our own and now here we were looking at our city with different eyes. How big it seems after Adelaide and how shiny and tall the buildings were in the early evening light. We were nearly home.
We got home by about 6.30pm and then the big unpack began; this time everything had to come out and the car looked so empty afterwards. The house however, looked rather messy and full of all our luggage but never mind, we are home safe. We did it – travelled around Australia anti-clockwise (or around Australia in 80 nights) without an accident, loss of anything valuable including our laptop which I was very nervous about something happening to, and also without illness or injury. Wow – what an adventure! Not a bad effort even if we do say so ourselves. What do you think?
Now is the time to make a comment all you lurkers out there. We know who most of you are and we’d love to read your comments. We’ll even publish them if they’re not rude or ridiculous! So give it a go. Your comment will not appear until we have read it and published though so be patient.
We would like to thank all our family and friends for their support in keeping in touch with us and making sure we were informed of news at home; it certainly helps keep away the worry when we can hear from you regularly and in some ways make it easier to feel less homesick too when we were away for such a long time.
And if any of you ever want to travel around Australia, I think we may be able to give you the benefit of our experience.

Thanks for reading our BLOG everyone!