Echuca Day 2

There is so much to see and do in Echuca.  We have had to sit down together and list the things that we REALLY wanted to see because we won't be able to see it all!  Today we chose "The Great Aussie Beer Shed", "Old Penny Arcade" and another Holden Museum. The Great Aussie Beer Shed was first on our list.

The shed (or should I say sheds) is located around 8km from Echuca town centre and as we drive in we see that we are the only car there.  The owner of the collection, Neil, comes over to greet and welcome us to his establishment and points us in the direction that we should take around the vast area.  There are many sheds and converted storage containers containing more memorabilia than you could possibly imagine.  The saying that one man's junk is another man's treasure definitely had this place in mind.

However, it is all beautiful displayed and you do not feel overwhelmed with information overload.  We wandered in and out of the areas passing quickly through the things that we have seen before.  Of course the whole concept is based around beer and the first building has thousands of beer steins but running up the centre of this shed is quite a unique selection of vintage horse drown carriages. 

I enjoyed one of the storage containers that contained a lot of household wares and one thing of interest to me was the malted milk machines with the long silver container standing between them.  I remember that those six canisters were filled with the different flavours i.e. chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, caramel, etc.  A ladle hung on the inside of those canisters to scoop your flavour into the stainless steel cups that were then filled with milk and malted milk powder.  It was always a treat to stop at the shop with my dad, for a milkshake on our way home.

We wound our way through the numerous sheds and containers and zig-zagged in and out of other sheds and marvelled at just how much "stuff" people could collect.  It was also a reminder of our age that we could recall the use of so many of the things we saw.  Our host gave a ten minute talk at the end of our self guided tour about a couple of things inside the museum and pointed out the oldest beer bottle in his collection that is worth a small fortune.  It was quite an enjoyable morning.

Philip was on the lookout the whole time for Swan Brewery cans and bottles.  He has such great recollections of working in the Swan Brewery almost 50 years ago.  Of course we had to get a photo of him standing alongside the giant swan lager bottle outside the museum.

It took us much longer than we imagined to get around everything at the Great Aussie Beer Shed so we headed back into town and headed to another Holden Museum for a quick look. It was almost identical to the one we visited in Mildura so we didn't spend much time there.  Philip was hoping that they would have a Torana XU1 on display so that he could send photos to his friend Kevin, but no such joy.  They are a very valuable collectors item these days and anyone lucky enough to have one would be holding on to it and not putting it on display.......

It was well after 1 by the time we finished at the Holden museum so we walked a short distance further down town to an Italian restaurant we had spotted the day before.  We quickly ordered pizzas and a bottle of Pinot Grigio that came to our table in record time.  The pizzas were wood fired and I read somewhere that a proper wood fired pizza should not be in the oven any more than five minutes if the oven is hot enough.  These pizzas were so good and check out how the pastry has puffed up around the edges. That is a sign of a perfect pizza.  I ordered the house special and Philip ordered the seafood special.  We devoured both pizzas!

We needed to walk off the pizza after lunch so we took ourselves back to the Echuca Port area for a nice long walk along the Murray River and ended up back at the Olde Penny Arcade for a bit of fun.  For $10 you are given 14 pennies to play the machines.  These are original pennies that are actually very hard to come by these days and we are asked kindly to not keep any of them as keepsakes!  We played quite a few of the machines but we were not very good at it and preferred to waste our pennies on the old video machines that were actually quite "raunchy".....

By this time it was well after 3pm so we grabbed a couple of ice-creams.  Don't ask me why we chose ice-cream because it is just 15 degrees and very windy and cold, but we both just felt like something sweet.  We strolled slowly home licking our ice-creams and declared it a treat we wouldn't probably repeat until the weather warmed up!