Domestic Downtime

Welcome to Le Grand Pont (trois), our third extended holiday.  This time we are taking a measly 10 weeks.  Les grands ponts seem to be getting shorter!

Our itinerary is:

• ·       Mt Buffalo – camping and hiking;
• ·       UK – a short visit to Highcliffe to visit Uncle John;
• ·       Bordeaux – a few days visiting Julia’s friends Flo and Jean-Mi and to have a peek at Julia’s house;
• ·       Puy de dome and Clermont Ferrand – one day/night;
• ·       Beaune (in Burgundy) – one week;
• ·       Buis les Baronnies – 3 ½ weeks;
• ·       Crete – one week;
• ·       Santorini – 4 days;
• ·       Athens – 6 days.

Mt Buffalo

We rolled the camper trailer out of the garage, hooked it up to the car and headed off to Mt Buffalo on Friday 12^th April for our annual Easter camping trip at Victoria’s premier camping and hiking destination.

This year our neighbours and friends: Michael, Angela and Sherri joined us.  Sherri is Canadian and lifted the camping standards to new heights by bringing along her hammock and by demonstrating her superior fire making skills.

The weather was fantastic – up until Easter Sunday – and we did 5 major walks

1. Long Plain loop – Dale and I walked out along Long Plain and looped back past the Mac’s Point trailhead before everyone else arrived on Saturday.

2. Back Wall – six of us did this on Sunday, for the first time in several years.  We should do this walk more often because the terrain and vegetation are varied and the views at the Back Wall are excellent.  This is definitely one of the best walks on the plateau.

3. Mac’s Point – Dale, Anthony, Dennis and I decided to tackle the cursed Mac’s Point walk.  Again, for the first time in several years.  We’ve had a lot of bad luck on this walk.  One year, Anthony and Dennis were abandoned by their fellow walkers in the middle of a storm.  Another year Dale lost expensive sunglasses.  And worst of all, another time, we lost a child for about an hour.  Fortunately, everything went well this year and so we hope that the curse is broken.  The track was very overgrown in some areas so we’re not sure that the National Park rangers are all that fond of it either.

On Tuesday we took a day off from hiking and went down the mountain to Bright and Porepunkah. We had a delightful picnic lunch at Ringer Reef Winery including a couple of bottles of Rose.

4. Mt Dunn – The walking recommenced on Wednesday.  This is not a particularly long walk but it is largely uphill on the way there and it culminates with climbing a system of near vertical ladders to reach the top.  Not everyone was comfortable with the heights but we all enjoyed the views.

At the top of Mt Dunn Anthony noticed that he had lost the hood for his camera lenses. As a result, we all kept our eyes peeled on the track on the way back and – praise the Lord – Dale discovered it lying on the edge of the track close to the beginning of the walk.

5. Mollison Galleries – This took Dale, Anthony and I more than 7 hours.  It’s a really interesting walk but a significant part of the track was in really poor condition (after the Eagle Point turnoff).  There were a lot of fallen trees blocking the track and they look like they’d been there for several years.  This poor state of the track was partly responsible for me gashing my leg and Anthony having quite a bad fall.  In both instances we were trying to climb over fallen trees.  Mollison's Galleries are part of an imposing and fascinating rocky outcrop that I really enjoy seeing so the tribulations of the walk were worth it.

This is a mini-gallery of shots of tree bark, showing the amazing variety of colours and textures.