Sunday, June 22, 2014

Eureka Day 6 – Bendigo to Melbourne






Eureka Day 6 – Bendigo to Melbourne

The night passed really quickly without too much of anything happening. I was the only one in the room i was staying in and I had noticed several things with the room and the hostel itself. The hostel had not been vacuumed once while I had been there and I do know no one had been into the room to sort out the beds that had been used or re made. It does make one wonder, but I am used to other hostels and this place supposedly had been sold to someone else.

The morning in Bendigo was cold, but I was up and out of the house by around 7am to get to the train station by 8am so I could catch a train to Melbourne. It was just on light and there was actually no fog until the sun came up and the chilly air. The plan was to get into the bakery and be off, but the problem if you call it that was the bakery was closed, which could be Sunday. I kept on the path to the station and found that there was nothing open when I walked in so I wandered to the service station. The service station was the smallest I had ever seen or been inside and they had no hot food at all. I got myself a mars bar and wandered back to find the canteen had opened. I was informed the pies were only warm, so I asked for a warm pie with coffee. I was most surprised to be allowed on the train with a coffee and pie eating in front of the ticket inspector. He never said a word at all other than to check my myki card. The rail card was interesting and would not be cause for concern at all.

The trip to Melbourne was interesting although I had my nose in a book the entire time. I think it was a pretty quick trip to Southern Cross station and then I needed to get out to Oakleigh to meet up with some friends i was staying with. It started with coffee once I had everything dropped off and there were surprises over how big my street directory was that I had been using the entire time. We all went for coffee and wandered through the town to where the Oakleigh park cemetery was located. It is now a park in the middle of the town. It was interesting that there was a whole community area with the cemetery being basically a playground. The BBQ was included in the area too. I did learn the town centre was well away from where the train station was now as the shops had grown around the station.  Always good to have locals show you around their local area and are able to show you what happens in the area.

Later on we were visiting the old Cheltingham cemetery to look for some family members where were located there. We did not find them, but did find that the cemetery was divided into two areas as one was the old cemetery and the other is the memorial park. We never found the people we were looking for, but only found an important grave to a prominent local who had a blue card stuck to the bottom of the grave. It was the only one Margie and I had seen. No matter how much searching we did on the phone we couldn’t find anything about their location in the cemetery. Most of my information is at home within my records and that is what I would need to check. Afterwards we took a drive to Ricketts Point for a coffee and I thought it was a nice area to come during summer where you could see many things on the beach including birds feeding. I would hate to be caught out in the middle of summer with a trove of people floating around.

Not much else happened as we got back just after dark and the roads were busy. Tomorrow I am going to take a ride on Puffing Billy and go out to one of the sanctuaries where there are carvings. Hopefully the weather stays nice for that to happen as I had heard it might turn nasty sometime during the day.

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