With this new blog my focus can be here a little more and while I sort out some things. I thought this weekend I might just do a Weekend Wandering post and then do a catching up post tomorrow. Or I may just put them both back together, who knows, will see how this goes.

Sovereign Hill

The other day a friend and I took a trip to Sovereign Hill in Ballarat. It is like a museum of the gold rush days there. So it is set in that era, so latter half of the 19th century. They have a lot of shops and businesses that you would have seen in gold mining communities, plus the type of homes that people lived in. It is quite interesting.

Mostly wooden buildings and dirt roads. They seem to wet the roads down so there isn’t too much dust. It was really warm the day we went. Melbourne and Victoria are having  unseasonably warm weather. It should be getting cold, but we are still wearing our summer clothes.

Lots of interiors to see and nothing seems to be off limits as far as taking photos is concerned. The above image is the doctors surgery, so glad for modern medicine. The sight of the saw in the foreground is a bit scary.

The interiors of the workshops were amazing, and just how you would imagine them to look. They remind me of many farm sheds, especially ones that have been around for a long time. They smell the same too.

In most of them they had people working as well. It was interesting to see them working and what they were doing.

Everywhere you looked there were people in the clothes of the period. You did feel like you had stepped back in time. We even toyed with the idea of finding out if we could dress up too. Though on such a hot day I don’t think I would have liked it. Though everyone dressed up does give the place a sense of authenticity.

There were school groups there and some of them got to dress up in clothes that school children would have worn back then. It helps fill the place with people in costumes. I loved the way the girls were taught to walk with their hands crossed in front of them.

It isn’t a cheap place to visit, the entry is $54 an adult, but you do get a full days worth out of it and if you are staying in Ballarat you can go the following day on the same ticket. We became members so we can go more often. We always come home with goodies from the lolly shop and the bakery.

I took over 700 photos, had to delete about 100, but still lots of photos. I would like to show more photos, so might include some in my catching up post. Here is a gallery with the above and some other photos. I hope your weekend is going well.

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