Today was a pretty mild 2 and a half hour drive, if that to return home.

Leaving Beaufort I headed to Ballarat in search of diesel and breakfast of some description. Discovered it’s got a very inner suburbs of Melbourne-look to it. All the houses all look like the expensive houses of the inner suburbs of Melbourne.
I’m sure I’ve been to Ballarat before, though can’t immediately think why I would have been.

One interesting thing I noticed while trying to find a Shell Coles Express petrol station (I realised I had some 4c off vouchers in my ute, I knew there were at least 2 Shell petrol stations in Ballarat) I noticed that there were two Maccas within a few kilometres of one another. However now looking at Google Earth and actually putting McDonald’s into the search for Ballarat I find that there are five in Ballarat. Four of them are within 3 kilometres of one another.
I guess, as it is the third most populous area in Victoria that’s not that much.

Bendigo is the next most populous, which also has four outlets, and the next populous in the other direction (going up) is Geelong, which if you include the outer areas of Geelong or rather the ‘when you look at it on a satellite image where all suburbanised areas stretch to’ there’s 9. Technically there’s 10, but two are on either side of a highway so they’re not really usable, you can only really visit one of those.

Being a Saturday morning coming back through Melbourne posed little problems and the 2 and a half hour drive felt like nothing compared to the 7+ hour drives I’d been doing throughout my road trip.

Still, it felt good to return home, even if it was into mildly busy though still flowing weekend traffic.