Daylesford Town

Along Raglan Street in Daylesford, Victoria. We saw wrought iron balconies like these all over town and in Melbourne.

As mentioned, part of our Australian trip was spent in Daylesford, a small town only about a ninety-minute drive northwest of Melbourne. It's a popular weekend destination in the hills of the Macedon Range for people in the city so it has plenty of hotels and bed & breakfasts. Mostly it reminds me of sleepy but touristed towns in the American West. With the area's gold-rush history and Daylesford's numerous mineral springs it particularly and pleasantly reminds me of Glenwood Springs in Colorado.

Perfect Drop is a good wine bar attached to a bohemian, living-room restaurant serving lots of locally produced food.

The Passengers sat outside on the patio of the local wine bar in the long shadows of a late spring sunset and watched the architecture turn colors. A very pleasant way to vacation. The scene went well with a Temptress Chocolate Porter from Holgate Brewhouse: highly recommended.

Raglan Street in Daylesford again. Further up the road from the first picture.

Good beer from northern Victoria, Australia

UPDATE (19 December 2011): David Sedaris wrote about a visit to Daylesford in a 2009 essay in the New Yorker.

Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than like an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petit fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like. “The spas are fantastic,” Pat said, and she parked the car in front of a puppet shop…