A Little Aussie Road Trip to finish the year
So today we set out on our little Aussie Road Trip. It’s a trip where not much is planned asides from accommodation - we’re going to have three days in Jindabyne and 3 days in Canberra and everything else is up to chance! Which is not like any other holiday we’ve ever been on so here we go….
We left a balmy Melbourne at 9am anticipating getting to Albury-Wodonga by about 12:30 for lunch which was to be fresh white bread and left over ham. Getting to Wodonga is a simple matter of hopping on the Hume highway and not leaving for 300km. The Hume Highway is a luxurious piece of roading: double lane and well maintained. Which makes up for the Australian scenery which was dry fields, smoke haze and the odd tree. Not a scenic road then. BUT it does have excellent rest areas - we ended up stopping every hour or so to give Rocky a walk around and each time it was a large rest area with bathroom facilities.
By the time we got to Wodonga, it was around 37 degrees so we at lunch in the shade with flies and bin-chickens. Wodonga is the Victoria half of the town - cross the river and it becomes Albury, NSW. We chose to stay in Victoria and take the B400 - otherwise known as the Murray Valley Highway. A few short kilometres and we were alongside the Hume Dam. No-one was very keen on stopping to inspect the dam - by this time it was around 40 degrees so I had content myself with viewing wistfully from the window. And ensuring everyone in the car knew that it took 17 years to build the dam. However, there was much a more enthusiastic response when I suggested a little off-road adventure around the reservoir. The lake is currently sitting at about 28% capacity so a lot of the lake floor is exposed and a little tootle round it was had.
The next little stop was the Boggy Creek Trestle bridge which required a 300m walk in the 40 degrees and I have never in my life heard such a racket in the forest. The cicadas were extremely loud - literally the loudest insect noise in the world at 120 decibels per cicada - and I now understand why they’re referred to as the siren of summer. You can enjoy this yourself in the video below - make sure you have your volume as high as it will go for the full effect. The trestle bridge was also great - built in 1915, it’s a listed bridge with Heritage Victoria on account of its mixed construction of wood, concrete and cast iron. It also looks rather rickety and unsafe so I resisted doing a Gordon and view from behind the safety barriers. The bridge is on the Wodonga-Cudgewa Line which was built to transport goods out of the Murray valley and also later used to transport materials to the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The line is 110km long and has 35 bridges over that distance and maintains a 1 in 35 grade over the entire distance.
In the tradition of all our holidays, and incurably contracted from my father, we always stop and look at dams, bridges, railways and power stations and today we achieved all four in one trip with our next little stop at the lookout for the Murray 2 Power station. It’s not often that you get to see the externals of the gravity feed - this one was particularly impressive with stark white pipes about 4m in diameter dropping 1500 metres from the peak down to the station in the valley. The water then flows down to the Murray 1 station so a double dipping of power generation.
From there we wound our way through 121km of Alpine Way which was like an extended version of the Napier-Taupo road - narrow, steep and plenty of corners. I got to drive that part! And everyone enjoyed that part of the journey immensely. The poor air-conditioning unit in the car was really struggling by this point as climbing steep hills on a 40 degree day didn’t seem to be inside it’s standard operating procedures.
