Sunday, July 3, 2011

Birthday get-away, mystery building, stair race

Gluten-free chocolate and vanilla cupcake

Luke and I are off to the tiny historic town of Walhalla in Gippsland for my birthday next weekend. It's perched on a mountainside not too far from Mt Baw Baw, so I expect it will be very picturesque but rather chilly.

Walhalla was a gold mining settlement that boomed in the mid-late 1800s before becoming a ghost town. It's had a renaissance as a tourist destination in the last 30 years but still retains its old world appeal. It also has a little old hillside cemetery which I'm a smidge excited about (me and my thing for old cemeteries). It has less than 20 permanent residents these days and it's quite likely we will have no mobile phone reception, so it should be a nice little get-away.

We're staying at a nice B&B. I'm hoping there will be somewhere with an open fire for dinner on Friday night.

I picked up a book at Reader's Feast today called Five Hundred Buildings of New York and I flipped it open to the page featuring a building I fell in love with while I was there but had no idea what it was. Now I know - it's the Ansonia Hotel.

I have a new thing where I try to make it to my front door before the light in the stairwell clicks off (it's one of those push-button jobbies). I have to pick up my stair-climbing pace a little to beat it.

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