We called today “Tom Day” in honour of our good friend Tom, who thinks that this year is just one long holiday, and who sees nothing arduous at all in our year of travel. So in honour of Tom, we decided to call any “day off” a Tom Day. So we’ve had a total slackers day today. We drove into the town of Lakes Entrance, to do our shopping, and amused ourselves afterwards playing crazy golf, then had a winners and losers prize of McDonalds ice-cream, followed by spending the afternoon on the beach here at Lake Tyree. The beach is remarkable because for starters its 90 miles long, and was completely devoid of people as far as we could see. Behind us on the beach was Lake Tyree itself, originally a huge inlet, but now a cut-off lake with no route to the sea, having been dammed by an unusually high tide last December. The town of Lakes Entrance, just 6 miles down the coast, is a bustling, charmless tourist resort, with wall-to-wall motels, caravan parks and cafes, but here we’ve found it much more laidback – there’s just one shop, which incorporates a chip-shop open between 4 and 5.30pm (how weird is that? All over Australia the chip shops close around 6 o’clock, except on weekend nights when they’ll stay open until 6.30!) – and not much else. We can’t believe that you can have two towns of completely different character side by side. When things start to get really busy towards Christmas, and the schools break up on 20th December, we’re obviously going to be looking for places like this to get some peace!