This weekend is the Queen’s birthday long weekend. It’s also the official start of the ski season for reasons I can’t really fathom since it doesn’t actually start snowing properly until late June or July.
Our first thought was to do a two day kayaking trip on the Murray River that we have been planning for a while but we unsure how cool it would be that far inland and also, since we are pretty busy at present, unwilling to travel that far and wind up more exhausted at the end of the weekend than the start. We settled on an overnight walk in Lerderderg State Park, a steep sided gorge with (mostly dry) river bed at the bottom. It only takes about an hour to get there from our house so we set off Sunday after breakfast and started walking late morning. Once inside the gorge we took a steep trail (several hundred metres of elevation) up to the ridge for wonderful views down into the gorge. The trail met up with a track built by the water authority to a weir that used (before the big dry, I guess) diver some of the water to the town. We followed the track down to the river, looked at the weir (dry on both sides) and the fish ladder (also dry) and then walked down-’river’ until we found a bend that still had water. We set up a nice campsite, built a fire and relaxed. Next morning we walked out the whole way along the river bed and got back to the start/end just after lunch.