Magical Mystery Birthday Tour
25 April 2005, 10:07
Husband had decided to plan a mystery birthday camping getaway somewhere in Victoria, so on Saturday morning we got our shit together, jumped in the car and headed north.
View from Mount Donna Buang
The intended destination? A lovely picturesque place called “Murrindindi” Scenic Reserve north of Kinglake N.P. It might as well have been called “Murrinbundy” Reserve, for all the bogans crowding the place.
We were meeting the Ds at a campsite called “The Ferns” – a terribly romantic name, chock full of bogans. Even the babies were bogans. Two other camps had already been set up, one with a large bogan family, the other with about 10 teenage bogans who had pumped up the music (Guy Sebastian? so had to get out of there). How’s the serenity?
While we waited for the Ds (no mobile coverage), I went to scope out some other campsites but they were all similarly full of bogans eyeballing me with a “don’t even f&# in’ think about camping anywhere near us, mutha*!@#”. I was sure someone was going to ask me to prove that I was one of them – as if “bogan” had been offically stamped on their driver’s licenses. Scary.
Come on, Mum. Giddyup!
Scarier still was as I returned to the Ferns, there were two little signs on the gate, one with the classic “No Dogs” sign (there were in fact, 2 big bogan rottweiler dogs at the site) and a “No Guns” sign. Now, I realise that the no firearms law is standard throughout Victoria, but I’d never seen it spelled out so thoroughly before. Evidently there had been some duck-downing action in them thar hills.
At that point, as was my birthday right, I chucked a massive tanty and insisted that we get the hell away from the place. Poor Husband. He’d thought it sounded so nice in the book (which it would have been if it hadn’t been a long weekend, and we hadn’t wandered onto the set of “The Hills have Eyes II”).
We ended up meeting the Ds in Healesville and traversing Mount Donna Buang to get to the Acheron Way where they’d discovered a neat bush camping spot off the road in the middle of the rainforest.
Nearly Full
The only oddity was a v. strange “whooing” sound all night that none of us could place. It was coming from the river, and if we’d been near any other people, I would have sworn it was some dickhead pretending to be a ghost (note: usually Adventure D but he’s calmed down on the trickster front since the birth of baby). No clue what it might have been, but we weren’t hacked up in the middle of the night, so it was probably harmless.
Cracked open some champers around the campfire, tucked into some chocolate birthday mudcake and enjoyed the ambience of the nearby rushing river and a pint-sized infant smacking her chops in search of boob. Lovely. V. delightful campin’ trip.
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