A little pot of Gold

There's always something guaranteed to make a woman smile. The promise of Gold.
We woke up to a particularly sunny day (by my Brit standards) and decided to take a drive for an hour or two to the city of Ballarat, and more specifically, Sovereign Hill. It's the site of an old gold mining town from wayyy back in Australian history....so 1850. About last week by an English timeline seeing as our school History lessons were packed with gossip from the Vikings and Henry VIII and his plethora of Wives from many hundreds of years ago. But this is basically as far back as you can go in this lovely land so exciting stuff, clearly.

It was all decked out in olden style shops and houses, all selling real stuff like sweets freshly made, or gold jewellery or candles, made via demonstrations and on site. Sort of a Museum and the Gift Shop all rolled into one. We panned for Gold in the little stream, at first having a laugh and joking around with all the excited kiddies.... until we realised we really wanted some Gold and got very serious and methodical about it. I was sifting about in the rocks and sand with gay abandon, glad I hadn't decided to refresh my manicure the night before. Our perseverance paid off however and I found 2 separate flecks of gold (probably only worth about $10) and popped it in a special pot they had handy for just such occurrences.

After carousing around some mine shafts and learning about a mining tragedy (I felt like I was on a school trip, it was brilliant!) we headed off to get to something to eat before the infamous Sound and Light show. A Sound and Light show, for the unenlightened amongst you (no pun intended) is exactly what it says on the tin. It's basically a play with no actors. We walked around the village at night, with smokey effects and booming voices coming from speakers telling a story. Then we got a bus up the hill to sit in an inside auditorium, one wall of which moved to one side so we could see outside to the "stage". It was really amazing, the story being of a digger uprising and battles and drunken people setting a pub on fire. Heart warming stuff.

We returned home late, full of freshly made hard boiled sweets and with my Gold safely tucked away in my pocket.

 Australia is sooo backwards....

 A bar of Gold we saw poured, worth over $140,000. I ran but was apprehended by the man in the amazing moustache.

Victoria x