Day 3: Glenrowen to Bendigo

A nice slow start to the morning - plenty of time for Khi to get some screen time in and for Bryn to make a couple of loom band bands (yes, the craze has reached the Langridge household) and we packed up and drove to Glenrowen. Perfectly timed, we parked, walked in to the Ned Kelly Experience just as the next show started. We all enjoyed the theatrics as we moved from room to room and absorbed the hologram faced mannequins tell the tale of Ned Kelly's capture, complete with sound and visual effects such as rain, gunshots, fire, bullet holes and animated models/items. It was all very dramatic and quite well done. The only bizarre thing was that the final room you walked through was kind of a cross between Santa's Workshop and a Children's Playroom (which was obviously very out of place in the scheme of things since we had just had a 'corpse' fall from the ceiling depicting the hanging of Ned...). It turns out that this room is actually part of the owners house.... very very odd!

It was then off next door to a tea room to experience cocky's joy (damper fresh from the oven, with homemade butter and golden syrup) and scones with jam and cream as well as a lovely brew of real tea while strains of bush music filled our ears (didn't that bring back some childhood memories for me).

We then drove around the town to see some of the key sites associated with the 'capture of Ned Kelly', including the actual site where he was captured and the railway station where his wounds were treated. On advise of the local blacksmith, we then took an alternate route to Bendigo via Violet Town which took us through some lovely, iconic rural countryside where we saw plenty of crops, cattle, wind mills and bales.

Arriving just in time to join the last tour of the day at the Central Deborah Gold Mine, it was off underground (60m or so) with our very entertaining guide Georg (no, I didn't forget the 'e'!). Hard hats and headlamps and all, we squished into the cage and descended about 60m. We learned all about the different types of drills they used, how the patterns of explosions changed over time and the typical experience of the miners....about geographic formations (including some incredible 3D maps of the extensive labyrinth of mining tunnels below Bendigo), the difference between fools gold and real gold, the history and the present of goldmining (of not only Bendigo, but other key sites both within Australia and overseas).... we learned about Cornish pastries having both a fruit end and a meat end in the same baked item and why they had thick 'handles' of pastry on the bottom which the miners threw away (it was so they didn't eat anything their dirty and arsenic laced hands touched).... we learned how lighting evolved from candles to calcium carbonate lanterns, about fatalities, injuries and mining-related illnesses and the myriad of ways that the creative miners used to secret gold out of the mines for their own keeping. After returning to the surface we had just enough time to climb to the top of the xxxxx and check out the grinding balls used to process the granite brought up from the mine before jumping in the car in search of our hotel... .which turned out, much to our amusement, to be literally around the corner (yes, the mine is virtually and quite visible over the back fence!) .

Bending to the whim of the kids, we headed across the road to the Beechworth bakery for a light dinner of pies and foccacias... where I was quite amused at what my kids thought a bottomless cup of coffee was actually going to be.... Bryn had the notion that it involved cupping your hands under a cup which had no bottom....!

A quiet night in, a few episodes of Big Bang Theory, and some time for me to sort out some pics and get to work on this blog.... bedtime now though, as tomorrow is bound to be another big day.