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Just got home from my first day at SheppFest. Sadly, I couldn’t make it to the opening ceremonies but I was determined to go to as many other things as possible on the days that I could make it.
My girlfriend, Alex, and I decided to make it a day trip and drive from Bendigo to Shepparton and back to have a look at everything Shepparton had to offer. After a load of car trouble, we finally managed to get on our way.

This was almost like coming home for me, I used to live in Yarrawonga and would often plan trips to Shepparton with friends or family. For a large portion of my childhood, Shepparton had been the biggest place I’d been to by myself. This was a surreal feeling being back in a place I sort of grew up in.

So, Alex and I finally make it into Shepparton and we gawked at all the cows in the park. Those cows have been there since I was a kid, yet I still managed to pick out a few I’d never seen before.
After a quick stop in at HQ, and lunch, Alex and I went to check out the festival. I was under prepared and could find exactly what I was looking for most of the time. We found the Festival wall first and it had perfectly summed up all of the different parts of Shepparton to make a whole community.

 I’d been so determined to check out the book fridges, apparently somewhere in the CBD, but I couldn’t find them to save my life.

We did manage to hit on of the things on the list though. The Cartonography exhibit. It was the coolest thing. It was amazing to think of how many different cartons could be collected from the Shepparton region and then compiled in an aesthetically pleasing way displayed in the middle of Shepparton. It was an amazing representation of the symbiotic relationship the each of the farms and orchards share and how they have worked together for so long for the benefit of the entire Shepparton community.

So that was it for us on day one. I was really hoping to go and see Ordinary Days but I couldn’t secure tickets for Alex and I at all, it sold out extremely quickly which is definitely a testament to the quality of the performance.

We made it home after a long day and all I could think of was how excited I was to go back for more things to experience. 

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