Category Archives: Travel

A weekend in Maryborough, Victoria

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Maryborough Railway Station – its as impressive as Mark Twain says!

An opportunity to hear a relative’s daughter in the Victorian Goldfield town of Maryborough was too good to pass up. It’s about 45 minutes from Ballarat and a couple hours from Melbourne, however, for us it was a six and a half hour drive, which with a couple of stops made it about an hour longer. Easy to do in a day from Adelaide.

We set off early on the Friday, taking the well worn path through Tailem Bend, stopping for a late brekkie in Keith at Henry and Rose. It’s been a go to for us in our recent trips. The coffee is always good, the service is friendly, and it has a good menu whether for brekkie or lunch.

I’ve lost count of the number of trips we have done on this road. Tailem Bend is about 70 minutes from Adelaide, and I always think it’s not until you drive past it you are actually on a road trip.

The recent addition of a world class motor sport park aptly named The Bend has increased activity in the region.

The towns on the drive are all ones we generally zip through. In the past, I have stopped at Cook Plains, but these days, it’s off the main road, so, these days, it’s a window view. Even though the towns whizz by, you can’t but love some of the town names, such as Coomandook and KiKi. We’ve occasionally stopped for a coffee and to ‘powder our nose’ in Coonalpyn. Like many of the towns along the road, it has a silo for the grain trains to stop at.

Once past Keith, it’s on through Bordertown across the border and into Victoria. We have often stopped in the nearby town of Mundulla if we’ve left late and need an overnight stay.

We made another stop at the quintessential Australian town of Dimboola. We couldn’t get over how much it had changed since our last visit 3 or so years earlier. On our previous visit, the town was all but a ghost town. Today it’s buzzing with lots of new shops. We revisited the Dimboola Imaginarium, which was being renovated when we last visited.  The Forbidden Forest looks a great spot for kids and The Dimboola Store is great for coffee.

Dimboola Imaginerium

From there, it was back on the road, through Horsham and Stawell, all places we were familiar with, before turning off to Maryborough. We weren’t familiar with this road, but the countryside is pretty typical of the region—paddocks with a few sheep and not much else. The dams were all pretty dry, which was no surprise given that it’s been a hot, dry summer. The final part of the drive took us through the Pyrenees wine region and Avoca before arriving in Maryborough.

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Crocodiles – a day in the Daintree

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Our week in Port Douglas was very much about relaxing and taking it easy, So rather than hiring a car, we selected a couple of tours. One of those was a small group tour to the Daintree Rainforest. Initially I’d planned to hire a car and do a self dive tour, I’m glad we abandoned that idea as this way I got to see everything and our tour guide was in charge of deciding where we should go – I’d have had no real idea!

The downside was that it was an early start, with a 7.20am pick up. As we have found with this type of tour, the other tour guests are usually pleasant, and across the day there is a chance to strike up conversations, usually about where people are from and what experiences they have had while they’ve been travelling. We picked up a couple,of restaurant recommendations and a some tour hints that we can store away for subsequent visits. Continue reading →

Cooktown, Far North Queensland

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  I have  wanted to visit Cooktown for as long as I can remember. I’m not a Captain Cook oficionado, but I have read a lot about him and his travels. His journey to Australia was epic and his ships stranding on the reef off Cooktown is a central part of his and the Australian story.

As well as my interest in Captain Cook, a trip to Cooktown provides a reason to travel through  the Daintree which is a stunning part of Australia’s landscape. To get to Cooktown from Port Douglas also took as over the Bloomfield Track which in a our previous visit to the Daintree we hadn’t taken.

Cooktown in a day makes for a long day, but we found a small tour that fitted the bill. Run by Dale Forsyth, his Air s to Cooktown 4WD Tours is his personally curated way to see the region. Our pick up at 7.45am, seemed early to us, but for those on the tour from Cairns, their trip had started an hour or so earlier.

The Daintree is north of Port Douglas and covers the area from the Daintree River to Cooktown. Bounded in one side by the sea and the other the Great Dividing Range. It is dense rainforest said to be amongst the oldest in the world.

We’d seen the Daintree on a previous visit  and had taken the opportunity on that occasion to visit the Mossman Gorge, so we were not disappointed that our first stop was the vehicle ferry across the Daintree River. To do the journey in a day a visit to the stunning Mosman Gorge is really a step too far. The ferry is the only connection to the small population that lives in the region. Without it there is a very long and difficult drive that was effectively the route of the remainder of our tour.

Thornton Beach

Thornton Peak

Our first stop was the delightful Thornton Beach. Continue reading →

Crikey – Australia Zoo

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We hadn’t visited Australia Zoo before. It hadn’t really been on our list of things to do in Brisbane, as it’s quite a distance from the city, and our usual routine is a couple days in Brisbane to see family before heading north for some sun. This time care of a booking bungle we had a an extra day. I booked our trip to Brisbane while i was in the USA and forgot the international date line – rookie error! 


The zoo is about 80 kms from Brisbane and subject to traffic is about a 90 minute trip each way.

We booked a tour from Brisbane rather than hiring a car. It was an early start, a 7.45 pick up to get to the zoo early. Apparently the trick is to leave the zoo by 3pm to avoid the afternoon traffic. 

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The Family Business Case Competition, Burlington Vermont

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It snowed and snowed!

Assembling our team in Vermont had been a challenge (Getting to Vermont).  The weather and flight delays meant our team weren’t able to get together to do their final preparations until less than 24 hours before their first presentation.

When I landed in LA, I found our WhatsApp phone group for our team had been in overdrive. One of our team members hadn’t even left Adelaide and found his flight was cancelled. He discovered it by accident and had to hurriedly rebook.

Church Street Burlington

Then, around lunchtime on my first full day in Burlington, WhatsApp lit up again as another team member got caught in the bedlam that is the San Francisco customs hall and missed her connection. The impact was a delay of more than 24 hours and a very rattled team member. Not an ideal start.

Fortunately, being in the US meant I could chat with her as she worked through options to get to Burlington.

Eventually, and much later than planned, she, our last team member, arrived. I met her at the hotel reception, or the card table, as we affectionately referred to it (The hotel was being renovated, and reception was crammed in next to a lift, pretty much on a card table) and helped her settle. By that time, it was less than 24 hours until the delivery of our first case presentation in the competition. It was far from ideal preparation; however, with the team all in the same room, they could at least put the finishing touches on their first presentation. Unlike subsequent cases, they”d had a week to prepare so. Subsequent presentations were given to the team just 4 hours before they were to present. Continue reading →