18th October 2009

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!
We paid our $22 to get into the World Heritage Listed Cradle Mountain Nation Park and drove down to Dove Lake.


The weather was crap, light misty rain all day and we couldn't see much of the Cradle, but we didn't mind because it was so great. We took what was meant to be a 2 hour walk around Dove Lake, but with my sore feet and wonky knee's it took 3 hours. After only walking unaided in September for the first time in 22 months I was stoked to finish the 6.6 kilometre walk.

The first part of the walk was pretty easy going, nice boardwalks to walk on but the last part of the walk was tough going, even a mountain goat would have had trouble with the rocky gravel climb.

Cradle Mountain still had snow on it, we got a great view of the lake from the top of glacier rock. There's a bit of everything from forest to beaches to waterfalls. The Honeymoon Islands are in the middle of the lake. A beautiful place and a must to see. I would love to go back again on a sunny day. We had lunch at the Cradle Mountain Cafe, here I paid for internet access but it was dial up crap and wouldn't move off the homepage grrr! Glenn fed the raven twisties.....bad boy! Cradle Mountain was a great place to spend my birthday. We left for Burnie at 3.30pm. When we got about 2 kilometres from Burnie my phone started going off with birthday messages, it was great!

If you don't have Telstra in Tassie then you only have reception in the major cities. By this time we'd had enough of paying $4.50 every time we wanted a cuppa, so we went to Woolies and bought a camp stove, canisters of gas, a pot, coffee, tea, milk and sugar. It only cost $36 and the way Glenn drinks coffee it paid for itself in 2 days. We lashed out on a cabin at the very nice Burnie caravan park, watched some tele (choice of 2 very blurry channels), spoke to Rachel on the net, took a shower and slept like a log, well worth $95!