Day 1 heading east

We have had far too much planning in our lives with organising travel schedules over the last six months, so actually planning a holiday sounded like no fun at all. We could barely work out where we wanted to go. We had been thinking of going to Tasmania, Melody and I took a holiday there before Abigail was born. The ferry however was going to work out to be an $800 round trip including three people and a car. So we decided against that. We probably ended up spending around $800 total on our entire holiday, so I think we came out ahead. There's no way we could do a holiday that cheaply when living in Russia.

The only thing we decided was that we would head east towards Mallacoota, a part of Victoria I had never been before and therefore Melody had not either. We took some camping guide books and a RACV holiday park book with us.

In one of the brochures Melody had noticed a tourist railway by a historic town called Walhalla. It sounded like as good a place as any for our first stop. Abigail had mentioned more than once that she wanted to see animals on our holiday. As we headed out from the Mornington Peninsula on the road towards Philip Island we noticed a farm where you can view the cows being milked. We pulled in five minutes before that started. Abigail loved this, she was convinced that the brown bull standing around waiting for the cows gave chocolate milk. There were some other farm animals to view in a nursery. Our holiday was off to a good start with our happy daughter in tow.

One hundred and fifty kilometres from home (no further than we travel most days to and from Melbourne), we pulled in to the town of Erica, near Erica. It's a little town of around 150 people, but it did have a caravan park. The caravan park was well below standard. When we pulled in there it was virtually deserted. We drove around and discovered Keith the caretaker. Keith was a pretty rough bloke in some ways. His face had sores, which I thought must have come from brawls, so I put on my best ocker accent to relate well. Melody thinks it was from simply never washing. One night there was enough, it didn't feel like the safest place, but that was probably simply cultural unease.