Adventure Juice

You joined the Hume Highway, the major road that runs between Sydney at Melbourne, at Yass and turned to the south. It’s a long and not very exciting drive however there is a must-do stop at Holbrook. Here, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest ocean, is the decommissioned HMAS Otway, an Oberon-class submarine of the Royal Australian Navy. Holbrook was originally called Germantown but was renamed during World War I in honour of the more patriotic British submariner and Victoria Cross recipient Norman Douglas Holbrook. The Otway’s fin was donated to the town in 1994 and the community decided to tender for the purchase of the rest of the submarine, but despite fundraising efforts and a large donation from Holbrook's widow, they failed. Cleverly, they then decided to use the money raised to buy the upper section of the casing - everything above the waterline when surfaced. It’s just one of those crazy Australian things that we love. 🤪

Mega side trip for you today. You scored some golden tickets to a behind the scenes look at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC) located at Tidbinbilla. It is a satellite communication station, part of NASA’s Deep Space Network and along with its two sister stations at Goldstone, California and Madrid, Spain is now used for tracking and communicating with NASA's spacecraft, particularly interplanetary missions. Its DSS-43 antenna is the only antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager 2. It is managed in Australia by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). A great experience. 🛰️

It’s officially Capital GeoBash Mega time. It’s actually a week long event over Easter with lots of optional side trips to things like Parliament House and the War Memorial. There were trivia nights (your team came second!), the most fantastic puzzle labs I’ve ever seen, car rallies, flag ceremonies, and even a real legal wedding! It really puts the one day Megas that I’m used to in Europe to shame. They did a crazy thing though of putting all the trackables on a table and no one can take any until the 31 March. You can only discover until then. There were 750 listed trackables but 300 of them have still not been logged when I write this 3 weeks later. I suspect that many will end up in a bag to be dumped at the next Australian Mega. 🐨

Finally made it to Canberra, the capital city of Australia, and home to the GeoBash Mega. We registered at the Mega site and then hit the caches of northern Canberra. Great views from Gubur Dhaura, a fascinating, ancient area of Aboriginal habitation and a significant heritage site. Gubur Dhaura means ‘ochre ground’ in the Ngunnawal language. In the past, the Ngunnawal people invited other tribal groups here to acquire ochre for ceremonies, trade and other purposes. 🪃

You’ve finished travelling east at Cann River and it’s time to head north out of Victoria. 🚘