Day Four Saturday 8th Feb 2014, Traralgon, Vic

K has organised a 4WD rally up into the hills at Rawson, to Coopers Creek across the Old Coach Road to Bruntons Bridge via Toongabbie. They take off early to beat the inevitable heat. We’re later led to believe that a few difficult ladies were abandoned creekside for a time. Not having a 4WD we race off to Aldi to buy a new folding outdoor table. Nowhere near as exciting.

Exhausted, we decide that the best way to beat the heat is to go to a country pub for lunch. With T and T onboard we drive south to Yarram and have a very ordinary meal in Yarram Club Hotel. Everything comes with chips, no vegies, no salad nothing else. The pub is delightfully cool, the beer ice cold, the company hilarious and it is an interesting old building, so it is easy to forget how hot it is outside. The town is very quiet, no doubt everyone is indoors with the air conditioning on.

The road skirts the Latrobe Valley coal deposits, and we gaze in awe at the Loy Yang power station on the way back to camp. We decide that with so many kilometres of conveyor belts it could be turned into a great roller coaster if ever the coal mining stops.

In the Rec room, the entertainment crew run a game of Pictionary that causes us great mirth and is won after a tie-breaker by the Seaford Sexy Six, or is that the Sexy Seaford Sixties? A raffle is conducted and T buys a signed tennis ball for $10. If it was really signed by Steffi Graf we’ll never know. After dinner the bravest of our bunch play cards even though the air conditioner is struggling to keep up against the heat. A few folks endeavour to solve the problems of the world over a red wine but most chill out in their cool cabins and vans.

2022 Note: I guess it’s time now to convert those conveyor belts into roller coasters.