See some sights or drown in the attempt

Day five....

If you followed our journey as we criss-crossed our way through the UK a couple of year s ago, you may recall that Ray is something of an histerian (oops - historian!). What many of you may not know is that he is not only an expert on kings and queens (the royal kind) and their inevitable battles he is also an turf racing historian.

So! Today's first stop after we departed not-so-sunny Sale was Rosebank.

You see there is a statue of a horse there. The story goes that the owner (jockey?) rode the horse from Rosebank to Flemington, some 200+ kilometres, raced him in the Melbourne Cup, which he won, and then rode him home again. Apparently he, the horse that is, did some other good stuff too.........google it! After taking the photo - in driving rain - we headed to Port Albert to visit a maritime museum. Well.....the best laid plans....... The museum was closed.

The park, however, had lovely clean loos! It looked like a lovely place, but it was very wet and very very very windy.

Next stop (going in the general direction of Melbourne) was Agnes Falls. Ray was skeptical, but I was determined (a phenomenon not to be sneezed at). We found the falls and although the sun didn't come out the rain did abate long enough to get some great photos and make Ray admit he was mistaken. :-)

After a lovely lunch in a pub in Leongatha and a wager placed on Drunken Sailor (he won), we drove to Coal Creek to see the heritage village there.

Coal Creek was the first place that coal was found in Victoria. They have done a great job of recreating the village.

It's very pretty and was most interesting. I enjoyed the general store as there was all manner of household good displayed from tins and bottle to butter pats and irons.

The next Jai, Taj and Annabella.

The bell in the picture below is the school bell and was rung when it was time for the kids to go to their classroom.

This is the classroom and the students' desks.

The table near the blackboard is the teacher's desk.

This is how they did their joined up writing.......

But that was all in the olden days before Nan/Auntie Relle and Pop/Uncle Ray went to school. (Oh yes it is!!!!!)


Ray noticed the carving in this stump just as we were leaving Coal Creek. It is a carving of a miner and shows the dates 1881 & 1981.

By the time we left Coal Creek it was bucketing rain and we decided to get to our accommodation for the night and rest up before our voyage to Tasmania tomorrow.