3 September 2013 - Lake Lascelles, Hopetoun, Victoria

Our decision to stay on was not made until after lunch, by which time the sun was up and it was altogether too sultry to be hitting the road. Chris had washed the car and caravan, an activity which always cheers him up enormously, or at least the result does. And then after a reviving cup of coffee we set off on foot around the lake toward the CBD.

Hopetoun has a caravan park, this free camping spot and a Bush Retreat also on the side of the lake, catering to the traveller enticed by the relaxed and picturesque spot. We walked through the Bush Retreat and paused to chat with a couple sitting beside the lake reading and ended up speaking to them for some time. They are up here by the lake to escape the demands of their garden, a short distance from home, but such are the advantages of having a motorhome; something we used to do on a Friday afternoon when we were working; “Let’s just head away for the night (or the weekend)”. Conversant with the region, they were full of low cost or free campsite tips and while they reeled the place names off, I did my best to store these foreign names in my memory. We could have lingered and chatted for hours, but were actually en route to the shop for bread and they were no doubt eager to be left to their books.

The town centre is no more than a kilometre up the street, and we soon found the newsagent for a newspaper, the bakery for tasty treats and the IGA for a more traditional loaf of bread. As we lingered outside what was once the shire office, we were accosted by a local woman who told us all about the Bush Retreat and how it offered excellent accommodation and function centre facilities for family reunions and the like, her own background in Hopetoun as daughter of a garage owner and now wife of a driver, how there were once five garages and now only one, how expansive the school bus runs used to be and how small they are now, how the shire had suffered fourteen years of drought, how the Wimmera Irrigation scheme which we had first learned of when we travelled through the Grampians a year or so ago, is now so much better now that the water is reticulated inside pipes rather than open channels. While she spoke with regretful nostalgia of how times had changed, she also spoke very confidently of life in the shire. She was indeed an excellent ambassador for Hopetoun and partly instrumental in us staying yet another day. We also learned that Ouyen is pronounced O-yin.

And so we returned to camp, ate a leisurely lunch, passed the afternoon reading and playing petanque, and once more enjoyed the peace of this rural lake.