18 Jun 2023
Road trip time! Today my friends and I went for a relaxed day trip to Maldon. We started by driving to Castlemaine, a 1.5 hour drive from Melbourne, getting Maccas on the way and immediately having an emergency stop to clean up 500ml of spilled fanta from the backseat carpet. Note to self, for future road trips, EAT IN instead of eating takeaway in the car…
We arrived in Castlemaine first because I wanted to take a train ride on the old Goldfields Railway, a heritage train “linking the historic gold mining towns of Castlemaine and Maldon” whose tag-line is “The way it was… the way we still do it”. Apparently none of my friends were interested enough to go on the train so I was by myself. 95% of the people who had a ticket for this journey bought a first class ticket, but I got an excursion class ticket, so I actually ended up having way more space than the first class people had. Probably because less people are wanting to go on weekend outings in winter. I got a little ticket that I was told was what the tickets looked like originally which I thought was cool! The train looked like trains I saw in the Cowra railway museum last year when I rode the Orange Valley Bike Trail, but I’d never been on one in motion. They almost look too old to still work, but they do! I really enjoyed the ride and getting the feeling of what train rides were like 150 years ago. I noticed it was quite creaky as well; I’m not sure if that’s because the train is pretty old now, or if they were always like that. I rate the Goldfields train.
While I had my joy ride, my friends went on their own joy ride around Castlemaine and then drove to Maldon to meet up. We walked down the main street of Maldon, doing a bit of shopping and having lunch at the cafe. It has a nice historic feel to it, and also pretty nice shopping. I ended up with some new fairy wren earrings, an Aussie Party Foods board game and a Japanese face towel with pictures of bikes on it. I was also surprised to see a very large Christmas shop open in June, and it appeared to be open all year round.
After our shopping we went for a stroll to the beehive mine and mine chimney, and took a bunch of silly photos pretending to fail to use perspective to look like we were holding the chimney. Before leaving Maldon we drove up to the Tarrengower Lookout Tower, which has great views of the surrounding area. I found out that the tower gets decorated with lights for Easter and children nearby are told the Easter Bunny lives in the lit up tower that you can see at night from nearby towns. It is also used as a point to watch for nearby bushfires in the Summer, and marks the centre of the state of Victoria (give or take a few kilometres)!
Finally, on the way back we stopped at Herons Reef Gold Diggings in Chewton for a short walk as twilight came. There were some remnants of brick-laying but not sure exactly what they were, perhaps furnaces. Honestly, I didn’t find the walk that exciting and I don’t even remember how I found it and put it on my list of things to see. I wouldn’t recommend it.
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