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Our trip to Wilsons Prom last year was fun, but too short, so this year we booked a longer stay. Unfortunately I injured myself right before the trip. I irritated my left SI joint and couldn’t walk uphill. My physio taped my butt in a hug, and thankfully it got a bit better every day, so we were able to do more and more stuff every day, but yeah… not ideal.

We stopped at Gurneys Cider on the way down. Same place we went last year but they’ve added a bunch of new ciders, plus the foraged ones taste different every year. I enjoyed my flight a lot. Still have a few bottles in the fridge.

We did a lot of evening walks. Started off with this flat one at sunset, and worked our way up to climbing half way up Mt Bishop completely in the dark. I wanted to see owls and stuff. We didn’t have that much luck except kangaroos (including this one who wanted to follow Scott home).

Of course we saw wombats in the campground as usual though. They make me giggle every time.

Watching the sunset from a look out. So pretty.

The campground was sooooooo noisy at night. I was very happy when everyone left on Sunday morning. If we go back again I don’t want to go on the weekend at all, even if school holidays are over.

But we were happy that the outdoor cinema was open on Saturday night! We watched Bohemian Rhapsody. I enjoyed it.

My new favourite camping food: bibimbap! Just bring a cast iron pan, some cooked rice, mince beef, stir fry veg, gochujang, and eggs and you’ve got a really delicious dinner. Love that crispy rice.

We played A LOT of games while I was still crippled. I beat Scott at everything. :D Carcassonne, 7 Wonders Duel, Agricola All Creatures Big and Small, Azul, etc. etc.

Scott on the beach near our campsite.

We did a bit of swimming. It wasn’t super warm out so it took me ages to get in the water, but once I did it was alright. We had a lot of fun body surfing. Scott wishes he got a video of me doing a front flip while trying to surf on the inflatable pizza. Maybe he can draw a cartoon of it. That surprisingly didn’t hurt my back at all.

PS what kind of skull is that?? It was pretty big!

Finally my back/hips were back to normal so we hiked up Mt Bishop, and around the Lilly Pilly circuit (which was where I was trying to go that night we accidentally walked up the mountain). I liked the Mt Bishop hike a lot more than Mt Oberon because it was more like a trail instead of a road, through very nice forest. We saw a bush kangaroo and plenty of birds and a “brown lizardy thing” as I was mocked for saying on Instagram.

Now that we’ve really done Wilsons Prom, where should we go next summer??

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I think I’ve written before about how once a month Scott organises something for us to do. I was really looking forward to the January activity… ATVing! We’d been wanting to go ATVing again, ever since our 50:50 fun/stressful experience in Oregon.

My coworker Rhys came along as well. I love yes people.

I didn’t take many pictures. :/

We started off by taking the scenic route to Gippsland via Tarra-Bulga National Park. It was a nice drive along the ridge of the hills. We did a little hike to a suspension bridge and tried to find lyre birds. We didn’t see any but we called every bird sound we heard a lyre bird, because how could you say it isn’t, haha.

We continued on to the coast and ate some extremely mediocre fish and chip shop food for lunch. Why did my fish burger have like 18 pieces of beetroot but no kinds of sauce whatsoever? So dry.

Do you like my pants bathing suit?? Best purchase I made in 2019 so far.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky but it was soooo windy at the beach it didn’t feel very hot at all. We still decided to swim. The water was incredibly warm so we actually stayed in for a while, but once we got out of the water we pretty much had to leave the beach right away.

We stopped in Sale for dinner supplies and then checked into our cabin. Drinks and games ensued. We played Upwords and Azul and Carcassonne.

The cabin was quite remote and the sky was still completely cloudless so I was really looking forward to some top notch stargazing. Unfortunately the brightest fullest moon I have ever seen in my life was rising exactly as it got dark. Pity. It was so bright I swear you could have read a book by moonlight.

Finally the next day was ATV time! Unfortunately it was way too slow and not that exciting. We wanted xxxxxxxxxtreme and we got zzzzzz.

Most of the time we were driving on paths around paddocks at 10 km/hr. Maybe if it had rained recently and there was more mud that would have been fun? But it was dry AF.

Eventually the dude brought us to a race track on his property and we got to drive as fast as we wanted for a while. I had a lot of fun because I had the best ATV. Scott and Rhys had some fun but still weren’t able to go super fast, and Rhys’s ATV was pulling to the right the whole time which wasn’t easy.

So yeah… ATVing was ok but not great. It’s always nice to get out and do an activity but we all wished it had been a little more exciting.

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A thousand years ago Scott and I went to Wilsons Prom for a weekend.

We drove down on Friday night after work, stopping for dinner in Fish Creek. We wanted to have a quick meal so we’d arrive at the campground before dark but the food took 5ever to come out. Oh well, other than it making a bit difficult to pick out a good campsite (Tidal River Campground is first come first serve) we were fine setting up in the dark because we are Master Campers.

**This just reminded me I need to change the batteries in my headlamp. Thanks guys.

Anyway after setting up we just chilled in our camp chairs and watched the wombats wander around and surprise people. Very entertaining. They are brave wombats!! And so pudgy. :D :D

 

After a delicious camp breakfast of bacon and eggs we set out on a little hike. Check out this wombat hidey hole!! And check out my muscley legs!!

We walked out to Pillar Point Lookout and then down to Squeaky Beach. We ate our sandwiches and decided we wanted to swim but it would be a lot easier if we headed back to the beach near our campsite. It was sunny and nice out, but close to the end of summer so the water wasn’t super warm, but once we got in it was pretty nice. I put my head under and everything.

Later that afternoon we put our shoes back on and drove to the car park for the Mount Oberon “hike”. I put that in quotation marks because it was just a road that goes up up up up up up forever. I did not care for that much up hill. It’s not very scenic until you get to the very very top and then it’s SCENIC AF, as you can tell from that picture. We timed it so that we’d get to the peak at sunset, and succeeded, but unfortunately the sunset was a bit boring that evening. Unlucky because the night before the sunset was spectacular!! (We saw it as we were driving to the campground.) Then we hustled back down the mountain and only had to use our headlamps for the last ten minutes back to the car.

PS that’s Tidal River Campground on the right side of the picture. Scott used extreme zoom on my camera and took a picture of our tent. He debated running up the next morning so I could wave at him from down there and now I have ragret that we didn’t actually do it.

We actually had a really miserable night though. It suddenly got super windy, and sand was blowing everywhere. Our tent has a full fly but somehow sand was flying under the edges and into the tent and EVERYTHING was covered. Our pillows were gritty. Our sleeping bags were gritty. Our lips were gritty. To make it worse, it was super hot but we couldn’t open anything up because we would have been covered with even more sand. So sweaty. I did not sleep very well at all. When we woke up in the morning we had grey faces!!

Our breakfast pancakes came out horribly rubbery for some reason and then we felt a few drops of rain so we shook everything out and packed up in record time.

We had planned on doing another hike that day but instead decided to just give up and head home, via a cidery and cheesery.

We went to Gurney’s Cider, which is a family run farm that makes very simple and tasty dry cider. I loved their Scrumpy cider made from foraged apples but it was a bit too pricey for me. I did get a bottle of Wild though.

And we checked out Prom Country Cheese for lunch. We had a massive cheese board. It was intense. It came with a whole bunch of huge pieces of sheep, cow and goat cheese, warm bread and crackers, meat and more. I’m drooling reminiscing about it. Lovely place.

Anyway other than the sand we had a lovely time at the Prom. I would like to go back again next summer, for a bit longer. The beaches there are really great, and wombats are soooo cuuuute. It’s really competitive/expensive to reserve spots there though so dunno. Maybe somewhere else along the coast is better.

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Last weekend Scott and I went camping in the Grampians. The campground had a big field next to it where you could see emus during the day, and kangaroos in the evening. It was my first time seeing emus in the wild. :D

Saturday morning we hiked up the Pinnacles. It was very hot and I am very lazy so we took the easy way up, from Sundial car park. It still took a few hours and involved a bit of climbing. The views up top were great!

Scott is so #basic.

After our hike we got ice cream in Halls Gap, and walked to Venus Baths, but it was a bit lame and had too many flies so we didn’t stay long.

We still needed to cool down so we headed to the Lake Bellfield swimming area. It was not very busy and I don’t know why because the lake was very pleasant. I really like lake swimming.

We couldn’t have a fire that night because there was still a total fire ban (we have such bad luck with that!!!!), so we just swam in the campground pool, read books, and played games instead.

Sunday morning camping pancakes to fuel us for another hike.

This time we hiked to Mackenzie Falls from Zumsteins via Fish Falls. This hike is longer, but much flatter than the quicker way to the waterfalls. Again, it was HOT AF!! It took us about 2.5 hours including lots of time taking pictures and refreshing our feet in the water.

Again, so #basic.

OK so the hike and waterfalls were lovely, but it all feels a bit weird now because we found out afterwards that someone actually drowned in the waterfalls the evening before, and they had only pulled the body out about 1.5 hours before we got there. The waterfalls were actually closed when we set out, but because we walked the long way in there were no signs!! D: I’m just glad we hadn’t gotten an earlier start because we could have seen it all which would have been even more disturbing. :( It’s all very sad.

You’re not supposed to swim at Mackenzie Falls but a lot of people do because it is SO nice. We totally would have swum too if we had brought our bathing suits. If you do decide to swim there, please be smart about it!!! Maybe wear a life jacket? Stay well away from the falls, they are much more powerful than it seems. Only swim if you are a strong swimmer. Be careful about slippery rocks!!

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Not dead, but yeah…

I’m just going to do a point form recap of the last couple months.

  • We went to Ballarat for an afternoon to hang out with Jono, and two fellow KJ’s, Kirsten and Kiera, who were visiting from Scotland. Was fun.
  • Jess and Michael and Ava came to visit. Twelve of us went to go see the Lego Batman movie. We took up an entire row and the movie was actually really funny.
  • Scott got his sleep apnea machine and now he doesn’t twitch every 30 seconds while sleeping.
  • Scott and I, and Jemma, Damien and April drove to Sydney for Easter weekend family shenanigans. We ate lots of delicious foods, did some touristing, lots of playing in parks, a bit of shopping. It was a fun long weekend.

A & A on the ferry to Manly.

This statue was actually burning hot.

  • Scott and I did a small chunk of the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk. We planned on doing more but forgot about things like sunset and darkness. At least we got some nice pictures in the magic light and the part we did walk was very nice.
  • I had a pretty good interview for a full time job at a different hospital but didn’t get it. :(

  • I babysat April while Scott, Damien and Jemma went to the rugby on Anzac Day. We played some games and read some books and watched videos on the iPad. I got her to go to bed but she didn’t sleep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Still getting the glitter from her boots out of the couch hahaha.
  • We bought a BBQ.

  • Scott got us tickets to watch footy in a VIP box through work. It was awesome!!! I drank all the free ciders and we ate all the food. Dees won too, although apparently it was a terrible quality game (didn’t notice/care). A+ would VIP box again.

  • It was also one of those rare times you get to go out on the oval when the game is done for a kick to kick. There are footies flying everywhere and it’s hella scary. But you do what you gotta do for a selfie, right?
  • Scott had a couple interviews and got a new job!!! He is much happier now. And he gets free juice!
  • I hosted a Stitch and Bitch at our (tiny) apartment. It went well though. I made (pressure cooker) pulled pork, and mac and cheese for lunch, and finished a few more squares for our granny square blanket.
  • We went to my friends 30th birthday party and ate her amazing chocolate cake and hung out with my new friends.
  • Many many trivia nights.
  • Many many yoga classes.
  • Masterchef AU started again so that’s television sorted every night. It’s on five days a week this year, but each episode is like 1 to 1.5 hours!!!!! The team challenge episode that we went to was on the other night but I couldn’t see myself. :(

I have a few more recent things to talk about but this is getting long so I will leave it for another post. It’s already written though so it shouldn’t take two months to post this time. :D