Kyneton

 The next stop on my journey was my friends house in Kynton. I might Gabby when I worked in New Zealand and we became best friends and very close and yeah have kept in touch every sense so when I told her I was coming to Australia. She told me to let her know when I was in her area and it was really great. I caught up with her and another friend of hers who I met there as well named Alice and her partner Mimi and we just had a ton of fun hanging out and getting each other again after all these years, and yeah it was just generally really good. We had dinner at a really good Indian food place and sat in inflatable, hot tub and drink and enjoyed the first evening. My second day we got in the hot tub with our coffees first thing in the morning chatting and laughing before heading out on the town going for gander around the different cities in the area. This area is known to be a mountain range in Australia but it’s very flat for a mountain range and it’s quite funny to have them. Call it as such. It is made up a lot of limestone though, so there’s a lot of springs and a lot of hot springs. Actually, the water kinda smells a little so free as it comes from the freshwater springs in the area. We spent the evening around the campfire, grilling chicken and veg, and just enjoying our evening.

The next morning, we went to town and picked up some groceries, and while we were walking through town, there was a protest for ending native tree logging in Australia. It was quite the protest specially, for a small country town. It had this giant puppet that must’ve been 10 feet tall that was a Half dead koala with the top half been looking very gruesome with fur and like it’s deteriorating in the bottom half of the body was just a skeleton and they had smoke coming out around it in front of them was a group of 10 protesters wearing these long red robes that went down to the ground and red hats, and they had painted their faces entirely white, and they had a sort of choreographed walk along with this really sad Halloweenie music they were playing to go along with their procession. it was pretty spectacular for a protest and I wish I had brought my phone with me on that walk so I could’ve taken photos. Yeah and actually the protest in general just had a really big turnout and Gabby knew a bunch of people there, and we walked alongside them for a minute between our running to the shops.

Afterwards we headed to the reservoir and took the kayaks out and spent the rest of the evening paddling about and checking out all the corners of the lake reservoir and was beautiful. Just really lovely couldn’t of asked for better weather warm and sunny but not too hot and just stunning. It was surrounded by pasture on one side and a eucalypt forest on the other , which was pretty similar to a lot of the area in a kind of savanna, but a little more little bit more hills, and a few bit more under story, but still quite open canopy widely sprayed trees really beautiful to look through. It was just really nice weekend and at the end I made them some good old-fashioned American food. We had bought some pork shoulder and made pulled pork in the crockpot while we were out kayaking, and then I made some mac & cheese with a jalapeño cheddar cheese they had and a coleslaw and it was just yeah a little bit of a taste of the south and home and they were so excited because it’s food that they never have They said maybe every two or three years maybe they might have pulled pork or mac & cheese, and definitely had never thought of putting them together which I found funny since it’s such a combination that was just a really beautiful weekend catching up with some friends and really lovely I look forward to running into them again.