A LONG TRIP AND A SMALL DAM

The Tank Hill Reservoir was hardly the main objective of this trip, 
which was in fact to overshoot it for the city of Portland. As 
mentioned in my last post, I had a two night stay there in order to 
attend an uncle's funeral. It was actually a bit like being at 
someone else's uncle's funeral because it turns out he was very 
involved with his wife's family and her children from a previous 
marriage, which is nice really since he was always a bit outcast 
from my mother's family. I'm still awkward at family gatherings - 
either in the form of sitting awkwardly on my own, or standing 
awkwardly with people while conversations of general disinterest to 
me pass by. A thought occurred to me last night that I'm not sure 
whether I am different, or whether I _want_ to be different. Not in 
the way of a mohawk hairdo and nose piercings, but just not feeling 
the need to try and mould myself into a character who matches 
others around him through thinly vailed fictions. Well actually I 
watched The Assasination of Richard Nixon last night and was 
feeling vaguely concerned about some traits shared by me and the 
lead madman. Even the mobile showroom bus idea, jeeze...

Anyway, arranging to stay with my mother was indeed a mistake. She 
picked a two-bedroom suite (more modest than it sounds) at an old 
1850s guest house still operating as a B&B today, for which I did 
end up paying a portion of the fee. When suggested over the phone I 
agreed this was fine for me so long as I had a separate room, but 
noted that my stepfather might have issues with it being upstairs 
and perhaps not having a good chair for him to sit in. "No, that'll 
be fine". Of course when we got there be immediately complained 
about the stairs and the chairs, and I also felt crowded being next 
to them and managing to hear them relentlessly chattering even 
through the thick internal wall of the bluestone building (I was 
tired out from the hot drive there and failing to get an early 
night's sleep). The next day we went to check out another two-bed 
room in a single-story building out the back (the old 
kitchen/laundry, even more solidly built in thick bluestone than 
the main place) which had a comfortable couch. The second bed was 
effectively in the attic, accessed by a neat spiral staircase, but 
with no wall between - just on a landing, and a shared bathroom. 
"That's not a separate room!", "yes it is, it's upstairs", "but 
there's no wall, no door, I'll hear you more than last night", "oh 
well, it's better for [stepfather]". "But I warned you about all 
this before you booked the first room!", "yes but that's all done 
now". So while they accepted the change of room and went off to 
explore the town I was back to my laptop for a hurried scan through 
the still-vacant motel rooms I'd been looking into back before my 
mother raised the idea of staying together. Finally it turned out 
the B&B had a late cancellation and I ended up staying in their 
best room at a reduced fee for one guest, which I must say was very 
nice for the second night, and exceedingly quiet back upstairs in 
the main building (but for a late-night thunderstorm which was 
still somehow less sleep-disturbing than the intermittent mumbles 
and clatters of my mother and stepfather). But oh the stress of it 
all, and overall for no cost saving compared to the motels I was 
originally considering. I'd say lesson learnt, but the horrors of 
childhood caravan holidays should have already put me off this idea 
if I'd had any sense at all.


Resuming this post at the other end of the week, having now finally 
recovered my energy... The trip itself was good fun. I followed one 
of my earliest planned routes as far as George Taylor's Stores at 
Grassmere Junction, a large two-story hardware/surplus store (plus 
motorcycle museum) inexplicably placed in the middle of open 
farmland on an intersection with a minor highway north of 
Warrnambool. You wouldn't know it from their website but this is 
actually quite a treasure trove of old obscure engineering 
equipment and army surplus, of the sort my old 1950s/60s 
electronics magazines are crammed with ads for. This central hub of 
the (rather diminished) George Taylor's Stores chain is the last 
remaining example of such a store in Australia that I've found. 
When I visited years ago there seemed to be more electronics stuff, 
in an area now devoted to office furnature. But since last time I 
spent so long hunting through that spot until closing time, their 
rearrangement at least prompted me to get to their area out the 
back where all the precarious stacks of army surplus crates reside 
under layers of dust which have long ago defeated the adheasion of 
most price stickers on the stock tumbling out from inside them.

Eventually I discovered some reels of switchboard wire for $3 each, 
and, after checking excitedly that the price was really $3 per reel 
not per meter, bundled up a lifetime's supply of insulated 
breadboard/veroboard wire in all the different colours they had. 
Also a plastic warning sign for lasers, because why not? A 
projector bulb (I've got so many projectors it was worth the chance 
It'll fit one), some really cheap bundles of narrow flexible 
plastic tubing, and for $10 a possibly never-used 5.25" floppy 
drive in an external case* designed for some long-forgotten "Zenith 
Data Systems" computer system. Excellent fun, though I did spend so 
long there that it defeated my aim of continuing to Portland before 
the weather got hot.

As a result I skipped visiting the collapsed volcano of Tower Hill, 
except to view it in passing from one look-out. Then the Jag's 
gearbox overheated (seems to be in increasingly frequent problem 
going over steep terrain in hot weather, I'll have to make another 
attempt at extracting the extremely stuck bolt that's prevented me 
ever changing the transmission fluid filter), so I stopped off at 
Port Fairy to let it cool down in the sea breeze while I walked 
around exploring an island with a lighthouse and finding some lunch.


It's nearing two weeks since the trip now and I still haven't 
finished this, so I'll be brief about the signts of Portland: Nice 
car museum, run by a car club housing cars owned by its members. 
The WWII museum had great exhibits tracking the progress of the war 
from beginning to end - spotted a few things I have at home, 
including the anti-aircraft artillery shells but they had the 
(naval) gun to go with them. The setting for it was well suited to 
me - a disused water tower (a vertical dam/reservoir?) - although 
at the same time not ideal in combination with my fear of heights 
because you can see all the way down from the stairs. Great view 
from the top though. A bit odd that none of the people stopping at 
the clifftop look-out below go into the museum - it was empty the 
whole time I was there (even the bloke running it was outside 
pruning the adjacent garden when I went in and paid the $4 entry 
fee in the honesty box). The actual port of Portland is, unusually 
for a rural town, still very active and dealing in bulk products 
like timber and (huge mounds of) woodchips. It's overlooked by a 
late 19th century fort built to defend against the Russians with a 
sequence of ever-bigger guns still there today. The last gun 
emplacement is still intact and was restored in the 1980s, but has 
since seen so little maintenance that it's back to looking like a 
ruin again, and the museum area in the interior section of the 
concrete ammunition store looks like it hasn't opened in years. 
Besides exploring the history, it was a great spot for exercising 
my biniculars again to spy on the port activities.

I returned from Portland via an alternate route, although diverted 
back to the waterfall I missed on the way up, where I ended up 
taking a nap before continuing to the nearby Tank Hill reservoir. 
This pretty little reservoir is gated off from the public but the 
road runs right next to it so you get a good view just from the 
western gateway, including of the earth-construction dam. 

Built in the 1930s, this is the only reservoir I'm aware of in that 
part of Victoria below and west of the Grampians, although they do 
tend to hide from me. It's built in the crater of an extinct 
volcano, so doesn't recieve run-off from a large catchment area 
above like most reservoirs. As the name Tank Hill suggests, it's 
mainly a storage location forming one part of a system to supply 
the relatively large city of Warrnambool 25Km away to the 
south-west.

Its tree-lined banks make an attractive spot that seems well suited 
to public access, but apparantly the water authority didn't want 
the trouble as "keep out" signs are plentiful along the low fence 
next to the small paved road. True, the close proximity to Hopkins 
Falls which I visited just before would probably make it a surplus 
of picnic spots in the area.

Return via Cobden was a fun drive through roads I haven't travelled 
since my last trip that way years ago. But annoyingly, like last 
time, it was getting too late and I was stressing to get back 
before it got dark, which I at least achieved this time thanks to 
the late sunset this time of year. After skirting around the 
now-dry lake adjoining it, I then confirmed a second time that any 
rumour of a pizza shop at the nearest town to home from that 
direction was either out of date or misunderstood. The shops there 
seem altogether dead except for the pub these days, night or day. A 
few new houses built on the outskirts though - I guess land is 
cheap there.

Back home and onto trying to finish this post for two weeks! In the 
end I've remembered that this is supposed to be my month off and 
just kept going past 9AM this morning. I just don't seem willing to 
write in the evenings lately, or do much at all really. I'm 
thinking of investigating the nutrition of my diet in case I'm 
sabotaging my own energy levels that way. Not that babbling here is 
a productive use of any surplus energy anyway.

I guess I'll be hunkering down away from the Christmas traffic for 
the next week or two, so no more adventures for the rest of the 
month.

 - The Free Thinker

* Same as this (but possibly never used since the drive still has 
its head-protector card inserted - probably more military surplus):
   
https://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuzzblog_july19/scuzzblogdjuly19_2301.htm