It's been a long year, with so much news you may even have forgotten some of the biggest moments.

But this sample might jog your memory of 2020. In January a Bendigo family left for a short cruise around Japan. More than a month later they returned, after spending weeks in quarantine.

The 150^th Bendigo Easter Fair was set to be one of the biggest ever, with tens of thousands of guests. A committee had been planning for five years. That's right, five years.

Read more: These are the stories that stuck with us in 2020

By the time the Easter weekend rolled round, the streets were all but empty.

Putting on your gladdest rags for the highlight of the week might also jog your memory. But on bin night, one Bendigo man had gladder rags than most.

Laura Tangey could never have imagined the enormous ramifications of COVID-19 when she was caught up in the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak, one of the world's first outside China

It was the final night of their cruise on the Diamond Princess when it sunk in for siblings Laura and Paul Tangey and their mother Liz that something was up.

The Bendigo family had nearly finished their holiday. They packed their bags and went to dinner. When they got back, the luggage was still there, they were told to go back inside and unpack.

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The next day - the day the Tangeys were meant to leave - they were still allowed to walk around the ship and use the facilities. Then about 11pm, they were told they had to quarantine.

The family was on a ship linked to 14 deaths and hundreds of cases.

They spent about the next two weeks isolated in their cabin, waiting on the Australian government. They were COVID-19 tested regularly, each time returning a negative result.

Ms Tangey said every day they could hear the captain announce new cases, with heartbreak in his voice.

Eventually the Australians on board flew to a quarantine facility in the Northern Territory, their home for another two weeks.

The protracted quarantine was "pretty boring", but comfortable enough. Ms Tangey said the family just tried to stay positive, glad they were all still well.

She said she was forever grateful the family avoided bringing COVID-19 back to Bendigo.

"We went through those 29 days of quarantine to make sure we were completely fine and be able to come back to Bendigo," Ms Tangey said.

"We were happy to do whatever we were told to do to make sure we didn't bring this horrendous virus back."

Ms Tangey said it was good to come back to Bendigo, but after the extended social distancing, she was a bit apprehensive of crowds.

It was only about a week and a half after their return taht Ms Tangey began working from home, which she's still doing now.

The family's experience on the cruise ship meant they took restrictions very seriously when they were introduced in March.

She said the family could never have imagined just how bad the COVID-19 crisis would get when they were confined to their cabin.

"We didn't expect it'd be ... everyone being locked down for 2020. We were not expecting that at all, who did in the world?," Ms Tangey said.

"The amount of deaths and people that have got sick, we could never have imagined that."

Ms Tangey said the Diamond Princess experience hadn't really affected her in the long-term, outside of awareness of a few small things such as sharing a trolley.

And would Ms Tangey go on a cruise again? Absolutely, she said. She'd jump on one straight away, as soon as they return.

Simon Mulqueen rejoined the Bendigo Easter Fair committee in 2015, essentially to help plan its 150^th event.

The committee spent five years working towards the fair, only to be forced to postpone just over a month beforehand.

It's the only year since 1871 without an Easter Fair in Bendigo. The committee's president, Mr Mulqueen said the event had been running continuously since before then-Sandhurst was even gazetted as a city.

Read more: 150^th Bendigo Easter Fair postponed

Mr Mulqueen said it was a huge disappointment, but it was just outside of their control.

The City of Greater Bendigo has announced it hopes to run the 150^th festival in 2021, but Mr Mulqueen said events would necessarily be just a shadow of what was planned for 2020.

He said it was still doubtful as to whether this would be able to go ahead, with no guarantees.

Remembering March, Mr Mulqueen said postponement seemed inevitable a few weeks before they decided, but he could never then imagined just how quickly the world would change.

"Like everyone we were taken by surprise I suppose, in terms of what was about to happen. I suppose we didn't expect things to get as bad as they did," he said

"We were hoping that we would essentially have the program that was set down for 2020 [as the] 2021 program."

Remember when rubbish collection was a white tie occasion? It seems like an aeon ago, but in April amid Victoria's first lockdown it became the high point of many people's week.

The dress-up trend stormed the internet, but one Bendigo man took the activity to a whole new level.

Brad McDonald donned a handmade six-foot bin chicken to roll out his bins in late April, using up a load of rubbish.

Read more: Bendigo's big bird bin isolation outing storms internet

The resulting video garnered thousands of likes on the Bin Isolation Outing Facebook group.

Mr McDonald said he believed the unusual, amusing nature of the giant ibis gave people a chance to cheer each other up, which was why the reaction was so positive. For himself, it occupied some of his time during the lockdown period. And it's meant lots of conversations with neighbours he might not otherwise have had.

Mr McDonald did go on to make one more costume, "Chompy", a six-foot dinosaur.

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