Peninsula This Weekend - 2 to 3 May

Peninsula This Weekend is our weekly dispatch: the plan we’d actually make for the weekend ahead, the booking worth locking in, and the bit of weekend thinking we’d happily do for you.

The first weekend of May is a good one to plan properly.

The school holiday crowd is gone, the Peninsula is back to something closer to its off-season self, and the calendar lines up well: Red Hill Market on Saturday morning, Allara Briggs Pattison at Peninsula Hot Springs on Saturday evening. That is a complete day if you want it to be.

The anchor - Red Hill Market, Saturday 2 May

Go before 10am.

The market runs from the first Saturday of each month at the Red Hill Showgrounds, and the autumn editions are consistently among the better ones of the year. The produce stalls - mushrooms, late-season greens, hinterland honey, root vegetables - are at full strength before the coach tours arrive, and the air has the first genuine edge of winter in it.

The move: arrive early, work through the stalls without a plan, then spend the rest of the morning in the hinterland. The day earns its keep in what happens after - a cellar door on Mornington-Flinders Road, a long lunch somewhere in the hills, a walk that earns the afternoon.

If you are making a weekend of it, base yourself close enough to stay south through Saturday.

The evening worth booking - Allara Briggs Pattison at Peninsula Hot Springs

Same day, Saturday 2 May.

Allara Briggs Pattison is a Yorta Yorta/Dja Dja Wurrung singer-songwriter with a real catalogue, performing at the amphitheatre pool at Peninsula Hot Springs. Included with standard bathing. The setting - thermal water, stone stage, late-autumn light over the tea-tree - is one of the better acoustic environments in Victoria when the conditions suit it.

Book the afternoon bathing session. Arrive early enough to secure the stone steps near the stage. If you have already been south for Red Hill Market, this is the natural evening anchor that closes the Saturday properly rather than leaving it open-ended.

Sunday 3 May - the lighter finish

Sunday is the day for the Peninsula without a plan.

A foreshore walk, one good coffee, and a deliberate absence of booked commitments. Sorrento’s back beach in early May is worth the short detour if you are heading back through the southern tip - cold, quiet, and nothing like the summer version. Leave early enough to miss the afternoon traffic.

The first weekend of May rewards one or two things done well. Red Hill Market is the anchor; the rest of the weekend is best when it leans on that and not against it.