To Warrnambool and back in a day
It’s been over a week, though things are slow in the land of Jeremy’s blog at the moment. Last Thursday, while I still had the luxury of being on holidays from TAFE, me and my mate Chris took the train down to Warrnambool for the day. Mainly because I had a free V/Line voucher to use.
So first is first, I had to get up at 7am, which is remarkably early for me these days, probably the earliest I’ve been up since I had to leave for Sydney earlier this year. Though I was able to repeat this effort one day for TAFE and actually get there on time, but not for the other day of TAFE this week. None the less, I got down to yee ol’ Spencer Street station (now officially known as Southern Cross… Southern where?) at 8:30 and the train left on time at 8:49.
Was good to sit back and enjoy the trip, until we got closer to Warrnambool and found the rain was starting to set in. Just over three hours later and we were in Warrnambool at midday. So we walked around looking for lunch, dismissing various pubs and cafés until we found a pub we liked. After lunch (which for me consisted of a steak sandwich with chips and a few drinks along side it), we walked up to the visitor information centre, located conveniently a good walk out of town at the Flagstaff Hill maritime museum. We decided we’d head down and have a shot at minigolf, only to find the place submerged in water and subsequently closed. So after photographing some geese, we took a bus back into town (it just happens that we turned up at a bus stop just in time for the hourly bus).
With two and a half hours to spare we just walked around town for a while and kicked back to some pancakes which turned out to be rather good amidst all the rain and cold weather. We got back to the station well in time for the 17:40 train back to Melbourne, kicking back for another 3 and a half hours. It was mostly too dark to see anything by that stage though we had a little for dinner from the buffet car.
Got back into Spencer Street in time for the 9:38pm train to Box Hill. I was truly knackered by the time I got home though it’s good to get out of Melbourne every once in a while.
April 29th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Sounds like you had fun! Pity we don’t have trains like that around here… I can think of a number of places, I’d head to, if it was as easy as jumping on a train for 3 hours! I think England and France and places like that, have good interconnecting passanger trains… Pity we don’t, cause it’s hard to catch a rid on the goods trains, and they don’t go anywhere far enough!
Nice photos, the day certianly seemed to have it’s grey clouds, and blue sky! The kid on the skateboard, with the bear… Interesting
Tim
April 30th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Hmm yeah found a map for Transwa. Looks like you can go to Bunbury and Kalgoorlie by train and that’s it. Might be able ot get the Indian-Pacific somewhere with WA as well but then might be stuck there overnight or for a few days, for the next one to come back from the east coast.
At least you are lucky that there has been a revival in the public transport system in Perth and the train system is expanding. Where as in the rest of Australia, the idea of a new railway line is a very radical and foreign concept.