The Young and The Restless | Chilling in Chiltern

As a word nerd, you’d think I would have known that one of Victoria’s earliest surviving newspaper offices still stood handsomely under some leafy green trees in the quaintly historic town.

But, I didn’t.

Therefore, finding it was like reaching into a cereal box and being rewarded with a prize when I didn’t even know there was a promotion running.

The National Trust heritage-listed office was built in 1859.

It published The Federal Standard newspaper from the early 1860s to 1969 and still has antique printing equipment inside, though we didn’t get to enter as it was temporarily closed when we passed by.

It’s just one historic building in the old-world town sporting a main street that will have you second-guessing whether your car had converted into a time machine in transit and that you had stepped out in an earlier decade.

We wandered the streets, framed by shops adorned with old-fashioned signage and built from sturdy brick painted with faded vintage advertisements, letting light in via ornate wood-framed windows.

Plaques on fascia walls drew attention to former businesses that had inhabited the still-standing structures, such as the town’s bakery, established in 1945.

Small, quiet towns often shut down on weekends and it can be hard to find somewhere for a good feed, but a flag bunting of bright colours beckoned us to the both popular and charming Lulu & Didge café and ice-creamery.

Too late to snag a table inside between the memorabilia-laden walls during the lunchtime rush, we ordered our slow-cooked beef burgers, old-school spiders and milkshakes, and were directed to a rustic little courtyard in the autumn sunshine and fresh air.

With a trio of teenagers who were that day in the mood for taking inappropriate digs at each other as my company, it was probably best we were exiled to the garden with its array of seating spread further apart than inside.

To burn some of the testosterone-fuelled energy so I wasn’t compelled to raise the music to a deafening volume on the trip home and drown out their bickering, we walked to the town’s picturesque lake on its fringe, before jumping back in the car and heading out of town to Mt Pilot, near Beechworth.

We drove most of the way up it to a car park just 300m from the summit, but we still got a heart-rate-raising walk with the incline, and, of course, teen boys can’t seem to stop themselves from climbing giant boulders off the path, swinging from low-hanging tree branches and bounding up wide steps two-by-two to see who can scale the hill quickest.

At its highest point, Mt Pilot is only 545m above sea level, but the views of the Chiltern-Mt Pilot National Park and surrounding areas are extensive and impressive.

We left before sunset to avoid kangaroo rush hour on the roads, but I can imagine the raised rock would provide the perfect platform for stunning views and Insta-worthy snaps of the sinking sun.

It hadn’t rained for quite some time before our visit, so the rock pools on the mountain’s surface were dry, but they would also have created stunning photographic opportunities had they been glistening with water.

My orienteering and directional skills leave a lot to be desired — I swear it’s genetics, ask my family — so I had Buckley’s chance of identifying distant peaks.

But I’m told on a clear day, which it was, that Mt Buffalo is easily recognisable on the horizon to the south, so we no doubt saw it while taking in the enchanting 360-degree views.

So yes, just 130km and an easy drive from home, this interesting early town has more to enjoy than you might imagine when passing a sign to it on your way to somewhere else.

Instead of curing my curiosity, though, our visit has made me ‘curiouser and curiouser’ about all those other little towns whose names sit unassumingly on signposts like part of the geographic furniture.

So much exploration to be had, so few weekends to have it.