I thought The Grampians was where all the grandpa’s lived…

I think Hamish was a little surprised to find that The Grampians is actually a national park rather than a town full of old guys…

We left the Murray River region and headed south again to The Grampians. Jim had wanted to come here ever since he had to do an assignment that had something to do with them, so here we are. We decided to stay at Plantation Campground which is a great free camp in the forest about a 10-minute drive from Hall’s Gap, which is a really nice little town in a valley.

It was hot when we arrived and now that we don’t have a pool to jump into the next best thing after setting up was to head off into Hall’s Gap for Friday afternoon drinks. The local brewery “scissors, paper, rock” was conveniently right on the main street so we started there with a flight of their own brews. After that we thought we’d move on to the Hall’s Gap Tavern for some dinner where the kids had what they think is the ultimate meal (chips, sausage rolls and pies). It was Parma night so we thought we’d better give that a go (when in Victoria…) which was tasty. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about really, but I’d have it again.

Well we were there to do the walks, so the next day we drove into Stawell (home of the Gift for those interested in athletics) where there was a dog kennels available to look after the dog for the day. We thought we’d go right to the top (literally) so our walk that day was to The Pinnacle. It’s a challenging grade 4 walk, and after a bit of sickness for me, and a couple of weeks in the heat for all of us our conditioning wasn’t quite up to it. We managed it though, and it was a pretty spectacular view at the top. It’s quite a popular walk, but most people seem to do it from the upper carpark whereas we started right down the bottom in the town. We managed to knock it off in four hours, in time to revisit Hall’s Gap Tavern for some rehydration (inside this time, as we were dog-free) then get back out to pick up Jett.

A couple of other travelling kids turned up during our stay, and after a while of watching our two look longingly at potential new besties I said “why don’t you just go and say hi?”. Heidi was off like a shot, and two minutes later the four of them were as thick as thieves and stayed that way for days. We’ve met surprisingly few other travelling families (we know they’re out there somewhere!) so it was nice for the kids to have someone to hang out with.

This stay happened to coincide with a whole stack of unexpected work coming my way as various people came out of the woodwork, so I had a pretty busy week work-wise. Luckily the internet was good (until it wasn’t…but thankfully that was on the last afternoon).

We also revisited The Grampians a couple more times, this time dividing into teams to save the drive back to Stawell. We did some shorter walks out to a spectacular lookout (The Balconies) and a waterfall (MacKenzie Falls).

But then it was time to pack up and move on, leaving the kid’s new mates behind. We drove out through the scenic road south then turned to head through Ballarat and up to Daylesford where we are now, staying 10 minutes out of town in another free camp, inside the crater of an old volcano!

I’m interested to explore Ballarat a bit further. My only memories of it previously is the week I spent there for Australian University Games many years ago and I have no doubt that the week I had then will be a bit different to the one we’ll have now.