Planning for an Easter Quickie

The title of this post is a tad misleading, as though of course we had to plan to take a four-day-weekend off 400 kilometres from home, the amount of planning we’ve done for this one hardly warrants a post all its own!

We’re saving our dollaroos for our long-dreamed-of tour in Europe, so the chance to get a quickie in in our home state, over Easter so as not to use up leave from work, and rough camping to save as much as we can on accommodation means we can still get out and enjoy the beautiful countryside without opening our wallets too widely.

Most of our planning, unfortunately, has had to revolve around the fucking basket-case that is the current state of V-Line, our public regional train network here in Victoria. Bus replacements, planned-then-abandoned industrial action, and general unreliability of the service has forced us to book a night’s accommodation in Melbourne the night before we leave, which probably cost us as much as the rest of the trip combined. The $10 fares make up for it a little, and we’ve booked into the NRMA Bairnsdale Riverside Holiday Park on Thursday night, as we arrive at 22:30. We have an unpowered site for $32, but after years of camping we’re pretty confident we can set up in the dark easily enough.

We are hoping to get about 60 kilometres for the first two days, then 50 and 30 kilometres for the third and fourth respectively, but we’re not sticking to that, merely to the idea of front-loading the distance a little to make things easier for us on Monday, when we need to catch the midday train home.

And that’s it. That’s all the planning we’ve done. We’ll camp where we can, eat where we can, and just see what happens.