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.
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- Mumdulla – pictures taken on a previous trip
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.