Winter visit to the Blue Mountains

We went to the Blue Mountains region as celebration for my recent birthday. The Blue Mountains were only a short distance away from home, and we kind of wanted to get out of the house for a change. As we were making the road trip up, we noticed that the originally sunny weather had faded away, and it had gotten much more chilly as we ascended. The national weather bureau had reported that snow was possible over this weekend.

In the afternoon, we headed out to a couple of lookout points. Hargraves Lookout was quite an impressive, albeit a windy sight.

We made a visit to another trail over at Govetts Leap lookout. It was remarkable to me how the rockface was shaped over the Earth’s lifetime, and how long the whole process was.

Dinner was enjoyed at the Golf Club, which cooked a very nice steak. The car did chime up on the way over, warning us that the outside temperature had dipped to 3°C.

This was mainly due to the fact that there really isn’t much thought put into adding anti-freeze—most places in Australia don’t dip below 0°C (32°F). Not that we expected it to be a huge problem anyway, since we weren’t exactly aiming to let the car cool down completely, and the valley was low enough not to freeze over.

Saturday morning was quite cold. We had put on the wood burner the previous night, and had some luck keeping the flames up, but it had died down just as we were getting to bed. Overnight, the cabin had cooled down despite running the air conditioning unit at full blast.

Not having had breakfast, we made our way up the hill into town when we first saw some snow cover. It was a surreal experience.

Making the decision to return to Hargraves Lookout was a good choice—snow had only fallen in a few locations, and the lookout was one of those places.