Bendigo

In April, Raewyn had a workshop/conference thing on in Melbourne for work. When she first found out about it, she suggested that if I was there for beamtime at the same time, perhaps I could show her around the synchrotron. I said, even if I'm not there, I could come over, since I have spare airpoints and it would be about the time I paid my mortgage off. So that's what we did, and took an extra few days' holiday where we drove up to Bendigo.

Why Bendigo? Why not - neither of us had been there before. It was actually quite enjoyable. We booked a holiday house for a few days.

Here's what we got up to:

Raewyn having a private tour with Chris Ryan, beamline scientist for the imaging and medical therapy beamline. There's nothing like a physics brain explosion to start the day.

Bendigo - mostly flat (like most of Australia), but dotted around the place you can still see some of the gold mine shafts.

We went on a mine tour at the Central Deborah gold mine as part of the Bendigo Explorer package.

The package also included an hour-long pottery lesson at Bendigo pottery. Lots of fun!

On day 3 we hired bikes and cycled along the O'Keefe rail trail out to Lake Eppalock and back. Not the highlight of the trip; I'm not sure if that was due to the hardness of the saddles or the sameness of the scenery.

On our way back to Melbourne airport we drove up to Mt Macedon and went for a bush walk. This included a visit to the memorial cross.

Autumn colours near Macedon.