Our short 3 day break was over. It had flown passed but the final morning was to be a beautiful start to the day.
Another glorious start to the day with the mountains just peaking over the fog/mist and clouds..Foggy or is it misty? Whatever it was it was slowly clearing, and was also catching the morning sunrise.Catching the first rays of the sunshine
By this point, Stuart was up and about. I had knitted some more of his socks and he was to get up and tell me about the wonderful sunrise. I didn’t point out that he had missed most of it!
The view from the from veranda was wonderful
But I was to capture this image as a result. Breakfast was a little later than usual but was in front of a fantastic fire.
The slow combustion stove in the kitchen/dinning/sitting room.
We were up and out by 9am. We had opted to drive the long way home, knowing that we would be getting home around dark by doing so, but the weather was good, some of the tops were clear and there was a chance of seeing something on the Alpine Highway, unlike the day before. So.…
But just be fore we left, we explored the onsite vintage motor museum…
The on-site vintage car museum. This vehicle was on the road until 10 years ago.The restoration team need to work a touch harderAnd you may have some additional passengers!
And so by 9am we were on the road, ready to climb and hoping for the good weather to last.
First stop was… well a corner on the road. I just had to grab a photo
Sometimes you just have to stop on a bend and get that photo…. there are mountains over there and they have snow on the tops. Is this all we will get to see of them today? You just never know.
And so we hit the Alpine Highway. But before long we were to come across the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric visitors centre.
Yep – that is it. You would have thought that they could have cut back some of the vegetation for us to see it wouldn’t you?Stuart finding the information board very stimulating
And so we left it to drive into yet more trees and see, well more trees actually. In fact unless you actually stop at the dedicated viewing points, the likelihood of actually seeing anything is close to nil. Actually if you are the driver, it really is nil. Oh and the noticeboard nicely informs you that the road is now entirely sealed.
The top of this particular section of the Alpine Highway. Not a lot to see unless you really like seeing 100’s of kms of Eucalyptus trees.
So when we spotted a rest stop, we knew we had to stop. If only to rest from the winding nature of this road. It covers a lot of km’s to go pretty much nowhere.
This is the road. You don’t need to guess what you can see from it!
And at the rest stop there are the obligatory toilets, BBQ point and picnic benches. And luckily a viewing platform!
We get to see something! Actually the view was stunning and we were so fortunate with the weather! You are looking at the Kosciuszko National Park and Mount Kosciuszko … is in there somewhere. Just pick what looks like the highest summit.
It was worth it as you can see! But there are only so many Eucalyptus trees I can show you. Honest.
This is a typical view along lots of roads in most national parks around here!
And so we carried on, winding our way up and down, round and round and round again. This is one of the few times we do actually find the sat nav and GPS in the car quite useful. It gives you a heads up of the nature and seriousness of the bend ahead.
And eventually we get to a river crossing, the Swampy Plains Creek in fact. And there is the nation parks camping site, and a tiny view of something other than eucalyptus trees.
A camping area at the side of the swampy plains creek.A tiny bit of a view to the left,and to the right. It reminded us of the river flowering through Pitlochry around the Kinloch Rannoch turn off.
And to the next opportunity for a view… but this is stop in the road job. However, it was Stuart that chose to stop this time, but he had other ideas on what the stop was for. Now what was the alternate name for our attempted world cycle tour? That’s right, scent marking his way around the world…
Byatt’s Camp. A view, and a good one at that. Now there is some history about this area all dating back to summer grazing of cattle and who created the access.
Not a bad view.
From there it was another climb back up and out of the area.
Looking back the way we had come from.The road ahead and onwards to the ski resorts and the way homeDead Horse Gap. Now was it the fact that your horse was dead on its feet by the time they got to the top (1,582m or 5,190ft) or was there the skeleton of a dead horse up there? I’ve no idea, but there are plenty of skeletons of dead trees from the deadly forest fires that swept through the area 15 years ago.The place was eerie with all the dead trees around.
From there it was pretty mundane except for our lunch stop at the side of a lake and for the fact that I alone was to see 4 emu. Stuart, as the driver, totally failed to see the 2 that were standing less than 10m from the side of the road! And I can tell you one thing, they are huge!
Its been slightly more than 2 years since we arrived in Australia having never set foot in the southern hemisphere let alone having been Australia before. So with that in mind and with one other little tiny fact, we decided several months ago to book a holiday away, train the chooks to look after themselves (harder than you realise) and for me, to finally leave the state of New South Wales. Yes, you read it correctly. I haven’t actually left NSW (ACT doesn’t count).
Now when we booked this holiday, we had no idea that we would have moved house or obtained a second vehicle, or that I would have be back into hospital for an emergency operation!
Fast forward a few months, Mum & Patrick have been and gone, we are sort of in the new house – we’re not yet fully unpacked, something I have been working on hard but we do finally have most of the chooks looking after themselves long enough for us to go away. There are still a few complications, mostly relating to no water in their compound…. so we had to purchase a 30L water container, a tap and jubilee clip to try to get around that issue. Luckily the weather has cooled down a lot, so the flock are not drinking anywhere near as much water as they were previously. Now the above, with a hose pipe attached and the water container at the top of the hill, meant that there was just enough pressure in the system for their water trough to work. That had been the biggest hurdle to getting them self sufficient for a few days.
The other related to a sick chook I had been desperately nursing back to health. We think she had a stroke because she was found much weaker on one side of her body that the other, but when we first found her we very nearly euthanised her immediately. Another one we had found in a similar condition had died the first night and we didn’t fancy this ones chances much either. But she survived both the first day and the first night and there were tiny signs of improvement each and every day at first. We set a deadline for euthanising her if she hadn’t made any significant progress. But she surprised us going from not being able to stand, eat, drink, sit up or even hold her head up (on the first day) to recovering sufficiently to be able to fend for herself for 3 days whilst we were away. Each and every day she made leaps and bounds despite having very poor balance when we left. She was left in the IKEA wardrobe in the mud room with a heater on. Right up until the morning we left we were wondering about her chances, but her progress had been so good… enough said, we risked it and on our return she gave us that look that pretty much said, what were you worried about?
So, leaving the state of New South Wales. It is actually an enormous state. It is bigger than Texas and that is a pretty large state.
We had chosen an Airbnb in a little place called Corryong in Victoria. Now for all of the restrictions on what can and can’t be taken into and out of the state we were expecting something along the lines of a border crossing. But more on that shortly.
We decided to stop at the Dog on the Tuckerbox rest stop, and failed to see the dog. But the food at Oliver’s is fantastic. I was expecting to not be able to have anything more than a packet of crisps or just a drink. I didn’t expect to find that they had a ‘vg’ option on their menu for vegan and I certainly didn’t expect to find that over half of their menu (and produce) would have that symbol. I actually had a choice and was spoilt for it. We ate in instead of the picnic I had packed and thoroughly enjoyed it!
Then we had a decision to make about our route. We had three options
stick with a road we had driven several times before and see the same things again until we turned off…
take a totally new route, cross country and risk finding more dirt roads and arriving in the dark and having the hardest route to drive.
stay on the highway for as long as possible then stick with main roads for a slightly longer distance journey but probably the easiest to drive.
In our usual style, we opted for the middle option, totally new roads and the possibility of dirt roads and a longer, slower journey.
First of all, we were to come across a memorial to Australia’s first civil aviation disaster but only in Australia would the memorial not actually be where the plane crashed! Southern Cross memorial site is on the top of a hill with a view.
Looking back up the valley. We had just driven along the ridge, but you don’t see much.The light was great and somewhere out there is Australia’s (mainland) highest peak. Honest!At the memorial for the air disaster. Only the plane didn’t crash nearby. It crashed some 30km away as the crow flies!
Australia’s highest mountains, or at least they would be if you could actually see them!
Looking towards Victoria and our route to come. It was time to move on.
So, that border crossing and the great moment. I’m going to leave the state of New South Wales and enter into Victoria. We’ve looked into what we can and can’t take into Victoria and unlike a lot of other states, we are only entering a rice control zone. Something to do with a disease. That’s OK. We are not carrying any rice with us… I’m still some form of formal border crossing for all of the hype around what can and can’t be moved around Australian states.
The big moment. Time to leave NSW and enter Victoria. I’m finally leaving the state after more than 2 years in Australia!
Yeh, and that really wasn’t exactly what I had had in mind. So much for the ‘moment’. We went to the right by the way.
Towong reminded us of a small town we had cycled through in Lithuania (we think). There, in one of the many parks, the Autumn colours were showing on the trees just like this and there were youths everywhere with brushes doing their civic duty, brushing the leaves into huge piles to be taken away and burnt. Here they were collectors with a large ride on mower presumably, but today, it was just a day to admire their colours (apologies for the quality of the image, it was taken through the windscreen of a moving vehicle).
It was almost sunset when we entered the town of Corryong and after a quick stop at the local supermarket – a surprisingly well stocked IGA, we proceeded to try to find the Airbnb. Then we decided we would much rather look at the view and stopped at the viewing spot for some fresh air and to look at the view across the flood plain. It was clearly a flood plain but missing rather a lot of water!
The view from close to the Airbnb we had chosen
It was a good view and worth the stop. The light was great, but it was getting cold and we knew that the Airbnb only had a slow combustion stove and that the owner wasn’t around that day to have lit it before we got there. So we had to leave.
With the fire lit, I proceeded outside onto the veranda to have a look at the last of the light and see if there was a sunset. It was disappointing with only the tiniest of pinkness around the edges of the clouds, so I wandered off to have a look at the fruit trees in the garden. In particular at the lemon trees which were huge. There were a lot of very noisy birds in and around the garden as well and I was hoping to get to see some of them. I didn’t, but we did find several Sharon fruit trees which took a bit of identifying to be honest! And whilst I was doing that, the top layer of the clouds started to turn pink and we had a great sunset after all!
Sunset from the veranda. The entire sky lit up, but only the top level clouds. Still it was nice.
