Monday/Tuesday in Bright
Monday was one of those days that you can't really find anything to write about. So to give you an idea. We were up,early and took Mike and Pam to Wangaratta where we dropped them at the hospital. We then spent a happy hour wandering the shops of that metropolis. We picked Pam and Mike up again after about an hour and went for a coffee in a little cafe.
We drove back in brilliant sunshine and had lunch before a leisurely afternoon watching the tennis.
Tuesday Rosemarie and I went out for the day. We had decided to visit Lake Buffalo and set off to the wonderfully named Myrtleford where we stopped to look at yet more shops and Rosemarie bought a pair of flip flops, because the pair we had bought in Bali had apparently worn out. Our next stop was a supermarket to buy some drinks and a bag of crisps and then we went to the bakery where we ordered custom made focaccia, mine with salami and salad and Rosemarie beef and salad.
The master navigator got us on the right road to the lake and off we went.
The road out to the lake , all 20 kilometres of it, was very lovely like a view straight off a postcard, and we arrived at the lake to find that to was truly beautiful. We walked around the picnic area for a while before deciding to drive to the other side of the lake to explore that. As luck would have it there were no picnic tables in the shade on that side so we decided just to follow the road along the side of the lake for a little while. After about 15 minutes we reached the end of the road, or rather it turned into a dirt road and we decided not to go any further, partly because the car we are driving is very low slung.
So it was back to the first picnic site for lunch and we sat here I the shade watching children swimming and eating our sandwiches. The highlight of this time was watching a toddler in life jacket who had absolutely no fear of the water. He toddled into it fell over and his mother had to hoist him out by the life jacket. The jacket was designed to throw him onto his back and he loved it. His Mum had to fish him out four or five times and then when his father came back the whole thing was repeated with him , father even took him him out quite deep and dunked him and he never complained. Absolutely marvellous and in a great setting.
We drove back to Bright after lunch and saw a huge plume of smoke rising just behind the town, it was difficult for us to decide exactly where it was but as we got closer to the town we decided it was further away than we had previously thought. We drove up to a spot called Huggins lookout and got a great view of the town, to reach it we had to travel along 5 kilometres of dirt road, so our earlier conservatism, with a small c went out of the window. From  the lookout we could see the smoke was a little further down the valley. When we arrived home we told Mike there was a plume of smoke but he seemed very unconcerned. It was only a little later when Pam took a phone call that we realised that it was a bush fire down the valley near a little town charmingly named Harrietville.  At this point Mike asked me if I wanted to go to another lookout to look at the fire and I agreed, after a five minute drive we arrived a spot where we could see the fire about five miles away. From this point we could see flames apparently 200 feet tall and we could watch the fire travel up a mountain, it was very frightening. Mike rang Pam and she and Rosemarie also came out to look. It is marvellous to see the destructive forces of nature like this but it is also very worrying, because if the wind changed and the fire changed direction Bright would be right in its path. This is not a phenomenon that we have to face in Cornwall. The result is that the road we arrived in Bright on is closed and several small villages have had to be evacuated, we are very grateful we are not in that situation.