Koonoomoo

It was great to see Sally again, although for the first few days she was flat out at work, luckily there were also a range of things to wander around and explore during the days.

The kids enjoyed a big quagmire in the driveway outside the house and slowly built up a landscape during our visit. Obviously some things from our travels made significant impacts with volcanoes (following visiting the Volcano Centre in Penshurst) and tornadoes (after watching a willy-willy make its way down a Melbourne street) kept appearing, wiping our significant parts of the town sites they had created.

We headed into Colac and Tocumwal one day. Tocumwal we found extremely interesting as the river clearly showed the impacts of the major rainfall received previously. Max was staggered by the pole that had floated it’s concrete footings out of the ground and drifted down the river. We also explored a boat mooring area where the water was still significantly higher than the moorings – in fact there was a ladder up to a jetty area, with the ladder completely under water.

The following day we drove back to Shepperton and spent the first hour wandering around a Mooving Art (painted fibreglass cows) display in one of the parks. We also went for a drive around the SPC Ardmona facility to try and get a handle on exactly how big an operation it is and then went and stocked up at the factory outlet. Finally we drove out to ‘Kidstown’, a massive children’s playground.

The playground makes the Donnybrook Apple park look like a tiddler – and is also better put together with most play elements linked together so that it feels like one giant play piece rather than a number of individual play elements co-located, but separate.

It has also been built to have relevance to the local industries, with one section made to look like it is built out of apple packing boxes and another paying tribute to the local dairy farmers. Many parts of the park have also been sponsored by local businesses which adds to its ‘friendly feel’. In the end the kids agreed that this was definitely the best playground they had ever visited!

Our last full day in Koonoomoo was spent with Sally – luckily work had finally slowed down a little.

She took us down the the ‘Big Strawberry”, a local cafe that had been built as an outlet for the strawberry farm opposite her house. Originally they had had coaches visiting the strawberry farm itself, however the roads and farm entry didn’t really suit the coaches so they had recently built the shop front at the main Koonoomoo crossroads.

e had lunch there which was beautiful and watched the couple next door to us order strawberry sundaes for dessert, which looked like they would take a good day to eat when they came out. They weren’t just huge however, they also looked beautiful – with the whole thing bordered by big, fresh strawberries.

We followed lunch with a visit to the horse training property Sally works on. This was another chance for the kids to gain yet another new experience, including attempting to crack a whip! The property itself was beautifully maintained and appeared well thought out.

Next morning it was time to head off for the Snowy’s – sad to leave Sally but exciting to continue the adventure.