Australia Diary 26 March 2002
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What a hangover I woke up to. It's times like these that you question how wise it was to drink that last drink. I blamed everything else apart from the most likely cause of my discomfort. It was the food, the weather, the air, when in reality it was of course the alcohol.


My discomfort was captured for prosperity.

The weather today showed sympathy for my condition by being awful as well. By the time we sampled Gillespi's world famous pies in Bendigo it was as though there was a rent in the sky through which an ocean was pouring. Feeling pretty sorry for ourselves (well I was anyway), we decided to call it day here and not try and travel any further that day, have a treat and book into the Shamrock hotel in the centre of town. This was instead of continuing on to the Grampians which was way too far for us to go with hangovers. (Em says we would have killed each other in the car if we hadn't stopped). Bendigo was kicked into existance by the discovery of gold in the area in 1851. The real boom years where from the 1860s to the 1880s when mining begun to get more involved as the easily accessible gold ran out.

The Shamrock hotel where we stayed is full of history. It was built in 1897 and is incredibly opulant. Legend goes that the floors were regularly hosed down to collect gold from the miner's boots (I certainly didn't see any lying around), A bizzare piece of history was that it was visited by Prince Charles and the then Lady Dianna Spencer in the early nineteen-eighties.

To tomorrow

Created by Dan Leigh /03/02