Randomness 24

I went gunzelling last night. I seem to have a recent desire to randomly gunzel Nightrider routes. Having already done the Belgrave (but not Rowville), Craigieburn, Croydon (but not Lilydale), Rosebud and St Albans routes, I decided to do a couple more.

Because I got dropped off in Windsor at 8:30pm and got a 64 tram to Swanston St, I decided to do a bit of gunzelling in the city to fill in time. At around 10:30pm, I got on a train to Essendon, from where I boarded route 483 to Sunbury, which only runs at night on Fridays and Saturdays. Whether it needs to run at night on weekends is a different story - there were no other pax onboard.

At Sunbury, I waited the 20 minutes until midnight for the Nightrider back into the city, which is a 77 minute trip via St Albans. I then got the Werribee Nightrider outbound and back in, filling in another couple of hours. By this point it was 3:20am.

From there, I was planning to do the Eltham and Dandenong routes (I would've arrived at Dandenong at 6:30am). I was tired and felt a bit nauseous after going over the West Gate twice, so I boarded the Nightrider back to St Albans. I alighted at Main Rd/Station Rd, only a couple of km from my house, but I decided to be lazy and get picked up so I ended up arriving home at 4:30am instead of 5am.

So I've now done half of all Nightrider routes. I might do some more next weekend, too. I'm thinking of getting the 11:27pm trip in from Croydon via Belgrave and Rowville, then 1:30am to Epping and back, 3:30am to Eltham and back, and 5:30am to Dandenong next Saturday night. If I do all of them, I would've done all routes except Croydon to Lilydale and Deer Park to Melton, which I can do on a separate trip.

Let's see what happens though. ;)

Randomness 14

I've hardly done any gunzelling in the last two weeks, apart from taking a few photos while randomly driving, at on Monday at Heidelberg station while waiting for my mother to get out of a job interview.

Uni in five weeks, yay. I really want a massive bitch of a skyscraper to start getting built in Footscray right now, to cure my boredom for a year or so. :P

Provincial Victoria 1

So, I never ended up getting to Adelaide. So instead, I went on a bit of a roadtrip around Victoria on Tuesday (No, I wasn't driving!).

I ended up getting to Kyneton, Bendigo (where I picked up a Bendigo Bus timetable for 20 cents, which I paid with a $50 note. Ouch), St Arnaud, Avoca, Maryborough, Castlemaine and Daylesford. Yes, the whole point of the trip was to take photos of train stations.

Highlights of the trip included driving on the Calder Freeway, which I'd been on before but not in daylight, Maryborough station, and driving from Castlemaine to Daylesford to Woodend in pouring (POURING!) rain and being able to see barely twenty metres ahead. Many, many cars were stopped on the Midland Highway about half-way to Daylesford as it really started to fall.

Erm, yeah. It was fun, really.

Monthly Plan 1

Apologies for not updating for a few days. I haven't really been anywhere worth mentioning, unless a routine long car trip to Chadstone and Southland last night counts.

I was thinking earlier about the amount of travelling I do on public transport, which is probably nearly 2000km every month (or an average of about 66km a day), considering the number of long trips I make. For example, on one day in September 2004, I did a day trip to Frankston, then back to Richmond, and to Belgrave and return.

Also, according to my last count, about three days ago, there are 93 train stations (not including General Motors) in the Metcard area that I haven't gotten on or off a train at. By the end of September, I'm hoping to reduce that number to less than 50. Which means I have a lot of travelling to do in the next month.

In the next month, I'm planning to have gone to every station on the Werribee, Williamstown, Sydenham, Broadmeadows, Upfield, Epping, Sandringham, Glen Waverley and Alamein lines, that I haven't yet been to, as well as Hawksburn. That's a grand total of 44 stations, or 1-2 every day for the next four weeks.

I'm planning to have been to every single station in the Metcard area, as well as everywhere on the tram network, by the end of this year. I'll see how well I go at that.

For some reason this entry has taken me an hour to type.