What a great way to spend your birthday. Woken up with a cup of coffee and loads of cards / presents that Chris has been carrying round for the last 7 weeks, then a call to Mum and Dad because it just wouldn’t be my birthday if I didn’t talk to them, an interesting selection of food for breakfast but nice all the same then off to the park to go for a walk. We picked up a picnic hamper from the lodge before setting out but decided we wouldn’t take the bubbles they had left for us as it would probably get quite shaken up. We drove down to Visitor Information which is where we can catch the bus from, you can drive into the park but they strongly recommend that you don’t as it is a quite small road and there are quite large busses going up and down, to be honest they had so many busses running it seemed pointless to try and drive so we jumped on one and set off for Dove Lake. There are a lot of walks around here but we had decided that we would do Dove Lake as it looked really nice. It is a 6km walk all around the lake and although it was a little overcast it wasn’t too cold so we set off. The view of Cradle Mountain is spectacular, you can see it for the whole of the start of the walk. It is called cradle mountain as it looks like an old fashion cradle with a baby in it – as long as you are looking at it from the right angle and the sun is just right! The first part of the walk was along the lake side, then we climbed up and had a great view over the whole lake before dropping down again to lakeside again. The weather cleared as we were walking round and it actually became quite warm – enough to remove a layer anyway. We continued round stopping to look at the lake from the many different view points, it was really spectacular and looked so different either because the light changed or we looked at a different bit. There is a massive waterfall cascading down towards the end, but unfortunately because of the vegetation and the fact we were quite a long way from it, we didn’t get a very good view although you can hear it most of the way round. Despite this being quite a busy walk because it is so long it doesn’t take long before you are walking on your own. We stopped for our picnic lunch on a bench overlooking both the lake and the waterfall and with the sun it was really lovely. They had provided us with smoked salmon sandwiches, mixed meat salad and rolls, orange juice and some cheese and biscuits which I had left behind because we didn’t need them! It was all very nice and a very civilised way to spend my birthday. After we had eaten our lunch we continued walking, at one point you could join another trail to walk back to a different pick up point but this would have added another couple of hours to the walk so we decided we wouldn’t bother, it was actually a good decision as we would have been shattered if we had done that as well. We ‘signed out’ of the walk – they ask that you sign in and out to make sure that everyone is out of the park in the evening and the bus arrived to take us back to the visitor centre. On the way back we saw a couple of wombat’s just munching their way through the undergrowth and also a couple of chickens with their chicks. We decided we would head back to our cabin for a relax and to drink the Champaign provided by the hotel which was really nice, then it was time to head off for dinner although I don’t think we will be doing any star gazing tonight as it seems to have clouded over.
