Apr 14, 2008 10:59
and gosh it takes a lot of petrol to get there!
Went camping on the other side of the Blue Mountains with the Man's family and a couple of family friends. Nine adults, one 12 year-old, two dogs, three gas stoves, four cars, five tents, six eskies, and one babbling river populated with yabbies and miniture frogs the size of a fingernail.
The camp site is set amid the ruins of a gold mining settlement. It is private property now, but remnants of walls tell of at least a dozen houses, and the retaining walls along the hill sides run for a very long stretch of the river. Best of all, the huge iron pieces of the rock stamper and milling wheels still stand. History AND nature. Cool, huh?
We looked a bit like an adventure advert - the Nissan Pathfinder, the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado, the Subaru Forester and the Subaru outback, with tents and tarpaulins and camp fires all spaced out along the river bank. (After two cases of beer, six bottles of wine and two bottles of Tanqueray gin consumed over two nights, we looked less like an advert.) Certainly, it was not a 2WD road to get into the property, though we skipped the real 4WD parts of the track as a concession to the Subarus.
The sky was clear and beautiful, it didn't rain apart from a very brief shower on sunday morning, and Lithgow has a lovely cafe that serves good coffee until 3:30 on a sunday afternoon to fuel the drive home. Perfect. Pity we forgot the camera.