Anniversary Travels & Belated Blogversary

 With all the busyness I realised I missed celebrating my 12th Blog Anniversary which was on the 5th of February!  I had started a blog about a year before but we were in the midst of a couple of interstate moves so I changed it when we moved to Bundalong and started again. This is a link to my original post and as you can see I had no idea back then how to change my blog name ..... Original Blog Post Here

February is also our wedding anniversary month - this year 37yrs and celebrated with our  Road Trip - Warning as there are lots of photos in this post but I wanted to do it as just the one post!

Day 1: Corowa over Mt Hotham through Omeo and down to Lakes Entrance

Climbing Mt Hotham

Poles set up at road edges for when its snowing

Mt Hotham at last

Since somebody wasn't keen on stopping - this is our shot at Mt Hotham lol

Made it out of the car at Omeo!

Going down the other side was constant ups and downs that I didn't think would end!

Bullant Brewery at Bruthen

That would be a thumbs down for this lot lol

First Glimpse of Lakes Entrance

Lots and lots of fishing boats here

Goodnight Lakes Entrance

        

Day 2:  Lakes Entrance - Eden - Merrimbula - Bega (original plan was to stay overnight at Merrimbula but when we couldn't get accommodation close to places to eat and such we decided to continue to Bega. Blogger appears to have loaded the photos backwards this time .......

Here we are at Bega for the night

Heading to Bega

Merrimbula

Oyster Beds at Murrimbula

Views from the Whale Museum at Eden

Old pots used for melting the whale blubber

My head in the jaws of a whale - they are huge!

A stop at the Whale Museum in Eden highly recommended 

Views at Eden

Coming into Eden

close to Eden

These flowers were growing wild all through the Bega Valley area 

I was astounded at how resilient the tree ferns must be - they have recovered well from the fires

Recovery from Bushfires

We were amazed at how Green the area of Gippsland Lakes is

Stopping at Bega we had plenty of time in the afternoon to check out the shops there ...... we ended up in a lovely antique shop and Pete bought me a couple of items I fell in love with which I'll share in the next post 

Day 3:  Leaving Bega (Cheese factory closed due to Covid) - through River Cottage Australia country - Bodella - Naroom - Batemans Bay and ended up at Canberra

We caught up with a friend of mine from Ravelry who lives at Brogo.  It was lovely getting to see her again and to visit their lovely home which is set on 5 acres so they do lots of self sufficiency bits and pieces which is right up my alley lol! Of course we forgot to get a photo of us together ......... We were told of another cheese factory in Bodella - as advised they have amazing ice cream!!!!

Lots of little shops in the small towns were closed still from Covid

And then the rain started !!

Narooma

Narooma - Just before it started pelting rain again

A break in the rain just in time to sample cheeses and get yummy ice cream!!

Back on the road and the rain is about to start again as we head into Batemans Bay

Batemans Bay with no room in the inns close to food so we continued on in the rain towards Canberra

Heading to Canberra over the range

Overnight in Canberra and glad to finally stop, although it was still raining!  We headed to the Tradies Club for dinner before heading back to the motel early as the past nights had been rather noisy at some of the motels!

Day 4:  The plan was to head to Canberra's War Memorial after finding somewhere for breakfast and spend a good part of the day looking at it all before deciding if we would stay another night or head home ............. alas on the way to finding breakfast we went to the Memorial to check the opening times only to discover they will only allow 2 hr visits which have to be pre booked at specific times and the next one would be a 3 1/2 hr wait - with Rain still on the go it didn't take much to decide to head back home which turned out to only be around 4 and a bit hours so we will go do Canberra another time when they are over Covid times.

And thus ends the 37th Anniversary Road Trip of just over 1600 kms!