Where - 4994 Great Alpine Rd. Ovens

Price - $25

Website - http://www.happyvalleyhotel.com.au

Reviewers – Lee & Nikki

For quite a while now I've been promising to get out a little further, to leave our Thursday-night-10km-radius-from-the-CBD comfort zone and check out some of the parmas that regional Victoria has to offer. But which pubs do we pick? Even if we pick a town or region there are just too many pubs out there to get to them all.

So welcome to my idea. We picked a region in Victoria, did a bit of a road trip over a weekend and basically chain ate parmas until it was time to come home, managing to hit up three pubs in Victoria's Alpine region over the course of a weekend.

Here's the fun part, rather than bank these reviews and dole them out over the next three weeks, I hereby declare it "Alpine Region Week", and will be posting a new review today, tomorrow and Friday.

So strap in! The first pub on the Agenda - The Happy Valley Hotel in Ovens, Victoria.

The Happy Valley hotel, a name so sugary sweet that I almost got diabetes reading the sign, is an odd little spot. The other two pubs we will get to this week both came highly recommended - This one I had never heard of, but driving past it catches the eye as a fantastically inviting country pub. The abundant green grapevines snaking their way across the facade is a fantastic visual, making this a very hard pub to drive past without stopping in for a cold one.

The Happy Valley pub is a bit of a dichotomy. The front bar screams old school country pub straight out of the 60's (apart from a few modern touches). A place you could pull up a pew and forget your troubles for a few hours. Walk to the back, however and it feels more like a cafe than a watering hole. You could forget you are in a pub entirely if you wanted to, making it a much more modern experience, at the expense of a bit of it's charm.