It was just becoming light when I woke up
and when I went outside the landscape looked distinctly white. On closer
inspection there was a thick frost covering everything which looked more and
more beautiful as the day got lighter, and especially when the sun finally
peeked over the mountains and made everything sparkle. The little pools of
water were all frozen and we had a wander through the terrain finding more and
more frozen pools and frost covered rocks.
Caitlin pulled a stick out of one of the ponds and it came with a chunk
of ice, so she and Liam ate it as an ice block.
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| Frosty morning |
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| Frozen pool |
The guests in both the other huts left this
morning and we were alone on the
mountain. After a morning pottering around
outside and in the hut, we packed a bag with snacks and warm clothes and walked
up the road to Lake Dobson. I didn’t realize that Liam hadn’t had much
breakfast so he found the walk and the whole outing less fun than he normally
would have. The lake was pretty and the kids played along the edge of it for a
while before we did the walk around it through a Pandani Grove which was like
forest I had never seen before, very ancient and mossy and gnarled. Beautiful. The
sky was very overcast by this stage but the weather stayed dry.
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| Pandani Grove |
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| Liam on the edge of Lake Dobson |
Back at the hut we got Liam some food and
the rest of us had some pumpkin soup that had been given to us by one of our
departing neighbours We had a family
game of Uno – we had to move into the bedroom to play by the light coming
through the window, as the window in the kitchen was south facing, with the
next hut right next to it, and with the door shut it was quite dark in that
room after about 2pm. Liam and Caitlin and I went back out exploring down the
hill from the hut – I wanted to check out a couple of groups of trees I hadn’t
made it to in the morning, and from there we found a larger pool of water with
big rocks on either side. Caitlin claimed this area as her magic land.
Caitlin, Liam and I played Cheat while
Millie did some dot-to-dots and colouring in and Tony cooked dinner. The kids
all played a game in the bedroom and I did some crochet, when we noticed that
the lantern was giving off less light than it had been – not sure whether this
was because we hadn’t given it the full charging time before we got up there,
or if it just wasn’t a very strong light using the rechargeable battery. Tony’s
torch, shone up towards the ceiling, gave much brighter light, so he rigged
that up so that we could see our games, food, and activities. Tony cooked our
sausages on our camp stove outside, since the night before the smoke from
cooking had filled the cabin. Several brush-tailed possums came to see if they
could score some food – some of them had really dark fur which I hadn’t seen on
a possum before. They weren’t scared of us at all and were quite determined to
stick around to make sure they didn’t miss any scraps (we were very careful not
to leave anything for them to sample) One was sitting on a ledge inside our
porch with his tail hanging down and Liam was able to touch the tail – a major
highlight of his trip so far.
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| Bennetts Wallaby outside our hut |
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| Possums hoping for dinner |
Another early night, we all went to bed in
our bunks and I read a couple of chapters of Anne of Green Gables to everyone –
then Millie (who had crashed even earlier than the rest of us) woke up about
10.30 and was up for a while – I stayed up with her for as long as I could
manage, then set her up in my bed with a lantern and pencils and paper, and I
went back to sleep, she obviously did too after a while.
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