My friend from work had a much better camera than I, and I have obtained copies of his pictures. I will not bore you with all of them (or rather, I will not bore myself uploading them all), but I will let you see a few more highlights of our trip to the Grampians from the Queen's Birthday weekend.
First, this. The scenery was beautiful there. This is what the view looked like from our motel.
Those little dots are kangaroos. You can see them up closer here.
When we left off from describing our Grampians trip, two blog posts ago, we had all hiked up to the top of a high lookout, and the camera battery had suddenly died. This is what we looked like with a dead camera battery on top of the Pinnacle.
Or, zoomed in a little:
We looked good, didn't we? Like strong hikers.
This is what the view looked like from up there.
There were other views, too, in other directions, that were equally stunning. But the above view is best, because the green patch to the left is where we were staying for the weekend.
We eventually did make our way down from the Pinnacle. From there, we took the car to Baroka Lookout, and looked out.
I know that picture shows us looking in, but we had looked out first. That's our whole group, by the way. If you zoom in a little you will see that we all look like we are freezing, because indeed we were freezing! Do not forget, oh warm Reader in the Northern Hemisphere, that it is winter here. We're coming up on the darkest day of the year, in fact, this week.
Next stop: along an orange dirt road into the bush....
... to a place called Paddy's Castle. A large pile of rocks for me and Jonathan to climb.
The grass and trees look nice and green, don't they? Winter is not bad here. The native trees are all evergreen. But on the top of a mountain it is freezing cold. It is. And it is dark early. Winter.
That was our last day in the Grampians.
The next morning, we left early, meaning around 8:30am -- just after sunrise -- and drove to Ballarat. In Ballarat, we took a three hour stop at a place called Sovereign Hill.
Sovereign Hill is a reconstructed gold mining town, made to look like Ballarat in the 1850s, when people from around the world traveled to Victoria, Australia, to try to make their fortune.
We didn't have quite enough time to see everything, but we did see most of it. And we went panning for gold.
Tim found the tiny specks of gold in his pan easily.
See that tiny speck on his finger? Yeah, I don't see it either. But that, my friends, is gold.
Jonathan was determined to stay by the chilly river until he found his own speck. Luckily, it only took him an hour to find ... two specks! We all left happy. Tim and Jonathan were happy because they had eight specks together. And I was happy because we got to see something else. Happiness!
And then, after exploring the whole village, shown below, we went home.
The end.
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