Penny's news: Day 11

Today the boys and girls split up. Wayne, Kev and Gaz were hardly out of bed when Vicky, Maz & I left to drive to Mornington Golf Club where we were picked up by a bus and taken to nearby Beleura House for the day. What an experience we had! We were seated in a lovely room and offered a beautiful morning tea served with silver service and a yummy choc fudge bicky thingy. While there the manager of Beleura House regaled us with the history of the place. Of particular interest for me was from the late 1800s when Sir George Tallis bought the house for his family as a holiday home – their main residence was Grosvener, a lovely home on 6 acres in Toorak – yep, they had money. Beleura House’s land was to be sub-divided into about 50 blocks but they just bought the lot, planted gardens and later gave land to develop Mornington Golf Course with the proviso that if the golf course land was ever sold they could buy it back for $1.

After this introduction we had a tour, led by volunteer, Jenny, of the extensive gardens and heard about their checkered history that included a massive storm in 2000 that felled over 60 trees and damaged 60 more. The gardens are spectacular and were a joy to explore, particularly as we had Jenny’s stories of the Tallis family, particularly John Tallis who inherited the property in 1948 and lived there alone until his death in 1996. Fascinating.

We were then served a delicious lunch of exquisite sandwiches and a dessert along with tea and coffee again. Another volunteer guide, Jan, then took us on a tour of the inside of the house. Unfortunately, as it is a National Trust Museum we were not allowed to take photos inside so you will have to take my word for it that it was very interesting and held lots of artwork and fabulous furniture.

All in all we were there almost 5 hours but it was well worth it and highly recommended. When we got home we discovered the boys went and got coffee and then had lunch at the pub. We win! Kev/Pen v Maz/Vicky played Euchre resulting in, you guessed it, 1-1. It was then time to get ready to head off to Russ & Sue’s (Kev & Maz’s friends) place for dinner. And that’s when the storm hit…for about 5 seconds. A bit of thunder, some wind and a few drops of rain.

It turned out we were redirected to Sue’s sister’s beautiful home right on the water at Edithvale as Sue was minding it for her. Russ and Sue were extremely friendly and hospitable and we had a great night watching the sun sink over the bay. The wind was well and truly up and there were multiple windsurfers out providing us with plenty of entertainment. The temperature had finally dropped from a high of 36 degrees down to about 20 and ironically it was too cool to sit outside but we certainly had a great night inside anyway. Sue cooked up a storm, Russ kept the glasses full, and a great night was had by all. It may have helped that Russ and I share a love of cricket so that certainly broke the ice.