The Thousands

So an acquaintance and I went in search of The Grande – an old hotel we heard about that had recently closed. It wasn’t that hard to find but it was magical. Looking inside the windows, I saw hotel room beds still made-up; the grand dining room still set for dinner; the grand piano had a film of dust upon its lid. “Hey, this is incredible. Look, at that beautiful linen. I can still see…” But my acquaintance was gone. I caught the tail of her dress leaving The Grande, heading back down Church Street and taking a sharp left towards the bush. “Hey!” I said as I struggled to keep up.

When I stopped running it was silent. In front of me, a bush pool. “It’s the Hepburn Pool,” my acquaintance said. “It was a natural feature but they converted it into a community swimming pool in the 1920s. It hosted the Victorian Swimming Championships in the 1930s.” It made sense to me – the pool was Olympic size. Though nature was slowly taking over, we spent the afternoon swimming around. We admired the lane numbers (there are six) and used the 1920 grab bars to hold ourselves up in the deepest parts.