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Boxing Day

Wendy was up early this morning to serve breakfast for her guests while the family slept in.  Leigh had to cover the morning shift up the the Maldon Visitor Information Centre so the Vols could enjoy the day with their families – what a guy!  After a lunch of leftovers – rolls filled with seafood, chicken and ham made by Wendy’s mum, Margaret, we were fortified for a little work.

Leigh and Wendy then left one side of the family snoozing on the couch (watching the Bond-a-thon on Austar) and went over to Castlemaine to celebrate some birthdays and Christmas with the Kinrade Clan.  Leigh’s birthday was 23 December and his youngest brother Stuart celebrates his birthday on 24 December!  We had a great time with the family including those from Adelaide (soon to be Bendigo based), Nan & Pete from Melbourne, and of course the boys.

Holgate Brewhouse

We returned home for an early night but decided to test out the Holgate Christmas Ale as Wendy’s dad, George would be delivering some to her brother Nick for Christmas tomorrow.  The description is “Christmas pud in a bottle” and it is pretty much correct – be aware that it is rather sweet, spicy and fruity.  We’ll let you know what Nick, the beer “freak” thinks.

We are now watching the Bond-a-than and drinking 0ur beers before retiring for the evening.

Goodnight

Wireless Internet is Here!

Today we installed wireless internet to Palm House.  The benifits of wireless are   two-fold.  For starters, we can now access this blog from anywhere in the house which makes it easy to update.  Secondly, guests will have internet access available to their personal laptops whilst staying at the property.

After playing with security settings we seem to have reached a happy compromise.  Guests will be charged a flat rate for internet access and recieve the WAP key for the duration of their stay.

In other exiting news, it looks as if Rex may be getting a little sister sooner than we thought!  We’re heading down to a breeder in the next couple of days and will write about the outcome…

Avoiding work…

Wendy’s father is coming up to stay in the spare room over the weekend.  The only problem with this is the room is absolutely covered in dust grit DIRT from Leigh’s renovation work.  The room is looking fantastic, if you spend a few moments removing layers of strata to see the finished job.  In a futile effort to save the vacuum cleaner from certain death by suffocation we just took a walk up the street.  During the lead up to Christmas the shops are staying open to 8:30 pm on Friday nights.  It was really fun seeing the shop keepers get into the Christmas  spirit by having a few drinks outside the shops – great work ethic guys!  Speaking of work ethics, back to it I guess…

R.I.P. Wertheim, you suck at your job but that’s why we love you.

Ode to the Haggis!

Last night we were fortunate enough to attend St Andrews Day celebrations at the historic Maldon Penny School Gallery & Cafe. St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland and the feast of St Andrew is held on the 30 November (more info about St Andrew can be found here).

After a short stroll to the Penny School, we were greeted at the petanque piste by the sound of pipes and a complimentary dram (one of many throughout the evening!). Before long the old school ground was filled with tartan from many clans and we were soon piped into the building to start the festivities.

The building was very well decorated inside with beautiful table settings and St Andrew’s flag bunting adorning the ceiling. The Penny School does a fantastic job at pulling out all the stops for these events – hats off to Barry and Marilyn! There is a real air of history in the building, and rightly so as the building is classified by the National Trust and Heritage Victoria. It was build as a multi-denominational school during the gold rush and it is believed the name “Penny School” comes from the cost of tuition. Depending on how lucky the parents were on the goldfields ultimately decided on how much education a child received…

After being shown to our table we were witness to the “Ode of the Haggis” with a fantastic poetry reading by local poet Richard “Skreitch” Leech after which the Haggis was paraded around the room before being carved and served. It was a great tasting dish, nice and spicy and it really hit the spot with a local Blue Pyrenees Estate Viognier!

The main course was a true Scottish buffet with dishes which would appeal to anyone – the roast beef with whiskey gravy was a great success. Desert of summer pudding followed which was made with sumptuous berries which were tart and balanced the dish very well. Between courses we were treated to Scottish and Australian bush poetry and a few songs about the ol’ country. We finished the night with shortbread, chocolate thistles and a serving of Atholl Brose, a mixture of oatmeal, honey, and whisky. Legend has it that the Duke of Atholl overcame his enemies, during a Highland rebellion in 1745, by filling their well with this intoxicating mixture and after a the amount of food plied on us we can see how this could be the case!

After a chorus of Auld Lang Syne we wandered back home and were greeted by our well trimmed hedges and garden lights, not to mention Rex who seemed to forgive us for leaving him on his lonesome for a few hours. I don’t even feel guilty for having a sleep in this morning…

Slightly off topic…

The editors of the Philatelic Database are good friends of Palm House B&B and we believe they are running a fantastic website. If you trawl their site you may even come across a few references to Maldon’s philatelic history!
Renovations are coming along well in the house – the end is nearly nigh for a few projects!! We are about to install wireless internet to help motivate us with our blogging as well as giving guests the service to plug into the network.

More to come soon…

Mt Tarrengower Vintage Car Hill Climb

The smell of burning rubber and exhaust hung over the Mount’ during the recent Mt Tarrengower Vintage Car Hill Climb.  This is a very well attended event which spans two days and brings hundreds of vintage cars and motorbikes to town.  We had two competitors driving race model MGs and two representatives from Shannon’s Car Insurance staying with us – it was an odd site having race cars on trailers set up in the car park!

Palm House included in top 52 accommodation destinations!

Today Palm House was included in the annual The Age – Good Weekend magazine’s top 52 accommodation destinations!  The phone has been ringing all day which must mean people agree with the publication’s endorsement.  We realise that we promised more photos of the garden but this was exciting enough to take preference.

Rex in the car

After getting up early to intercept the paper we headed to Bendigo to purchase some essentials for our renovations – Leigh hit the hardware shop like a mad thing while Wendy brought some pull cords for the new energy efficient downlight’s we’ve installed in the servant’s quarters.  Another suprise purchase was an antique desk for  upstairs which we were lucky enough to get our hands on before it was restored.  Talk about a snap purchase!

Aside form this news, we took Rex to the annual Castlemaine Sheep-dog trials today (you wouldn’t know he was excited from the photo to the right!).  He met a lot of Boarder Collies who were doing their job but he seemed content to sit down and lap up attention from other Boarder Collie owners.  After today it seems certain Rex will have a new friend to play with soon…

Grow Me The Money Public Report Launch

Grow Me The Money

We were recently invited to attend Grow Me The Money’s 18 month public report launch in Melbourne. As part of the launch, Palm House B&B and 19 other businesses were chosen to produce “Testimonial Boards”. A professional photographer was sent to us and got some superb shots of our environmentally sustainable practices. These images were reproduced on our testimonial board and in the report itself. One of the other businesses chosen to produce a board was fellow Maldon Taste of Gold member – Zen Eden, a fantastic organic cafe and produce store.

The report was very well attended by participants of the Grow Me The Money program as well as the Hon. Gavin Jennings – Minister for the Environment, Mick Bourke – Chairman of EPA Victoria and Wayne Kayler-Thomson – CEO VECCI. Putting the VIPs to one side, we found it was great putting faces to all the people in the program we’ve been working with since we joined Grow Me The Money.

We’re very proud to have our achievements recognised by Grow Me The Money and will continue to work through the program to reduce our businesses imapct on the environment.

Renovations

Painting Palm House

In our last post we mentioned we were escaping renovations at Palm House. The photo above shows some of the major work going on the exterior. What you can’t see is the scaffolding extending around the entire house. We snuck up the scaffolding the other day to have a look and got fantastc views over the Long Gully Mine next door as well as Palm House’s garden.

There are also renovations being undertaken on the interior, more details of these in a later post…