The weekend was lovely. We escaped from the burbs and took too to the hills – Lavers Hill to be exact.

Lavers Hill is located on the Great Ocean Rd, and lies inland on the ridge, in between Apollo Bay and the 12 Apostles. It probably isn’t very memorable to most tourists as they fly through on their way to see the 12 Apostles, but I love it as I have been going to Lavers Hill since I can remember (or before I can remember).

Dad taught at the Lavers Hill P-12 College 40 years ago in his first teaching job, and has since bought a holiday escape there.

Lavers is home to Melba Gully, a very beautiful example of the temperate rainforest species during the day (show casing some of the largest Mountain Ash, Blackwoods, ferns and Beech trees) was well as glow worms during the night, every night! Often when asking guests what their favourite part of their trip to Australia was, they say it was the glow worms at Melba Gully…so if you haven’t seen them, I highly recommend it.

Lavers Hill is also very close to Weeaproinah which is well known for having the highest rainfall in Victoria.  In these water challenged times, Lavers is still green when the rest of Victoria is crispy. With such green lush country comes leeches, sea fog, rain and it’s cold 99.999% of the time – except for this weekend.

On Saturday we meandered past Port Campbell for breakfast, and the most outstanding part of this was an accompanying Rhubarb relish. If you know what Dutch Curry sauce is like (probably more popular in Holland, and definitely yummier than Tomato sauce) then you will love this relish.

I discovered this relish was made in a near-by town Nirranda by a lady called Lana, and before you knew it, we were traipsing about the countryside looking for relish.

I was fortunate enough to discover where Lana is, and she sold me some relish over the fence. Lana resorted to Rhubarb after discovering that tomato-based products caused her son eczema. She makes other rhubarb products, and uses all natural ingredients without any artificial additives. I might be able to try some of these one day if I can move on past the relish. You can find more on her website www.lanasgarden.com.

Whenever we go back to Holland, Tom spends at least one week getting over his ‘Patat Speciaal’ fetish, which consists of crunchy yellow potato chips with mayonaise, curry sauce and white onion. Now with the discovery of this relish, he never need to go to Holland again (except to visit the family of course!).