Day 43 (March 14) - Gembrook to Darnum

One novelty about this entry is that I'm actually writing it on the day it happened! I've been writing for the past couple of hours, and it's now 11:15pm and I've finally caught up! Sorry, we will try to keep up, but we don't always have a lot of free time in the evening.


Aaaaanyway... back to the morning. We hadn't really been able to see much of our camp site when we arrived last night, so it was delightful to look outside this morning and see the sun filtering clearly through tall native forests!

We'd had a bit of a challenge getting in last night but getting out was a lot easier than we expected. We put the Pajero into 2WD just to see how valuable 4WD really was, but it pulled the whole 5 tonnes of us out just on those two rear tyres!

Our campsite near Kurth Kiln, Gembrook

We could see some tent roofs in the distance so decided to drive up a bit and see if we could find where we were actually supposed to be camping. The night had been a bit disturbed with several cars tearing up the track past us, which seemed odd since we were some distance into the bush, so we wondered what else was nearby. Well about 100m up the road we found the clearly marked entrance to the Scout Loop campground, which turned out to be a series of probably 60-70 relatively flat, smooth and well set up camp sites coming off a loop road. There was even a toilet on site! Oh well we had fun nonetheless! :)

Us at Lakeside Station, Emerald

From here we decided to track down part of the Puffing Billy route since it was in the area. So we made our way to Lakeside station in Emerald in plenty of time to see the train from Belgrave come in with its load of passengers.

There were some delightfully tame Crimson Rosellas which all the kids had a go at feeding, Judah particularly who loves birds!

By now it was time to move on and find a spot to stop for the night. We checked the CALS diary (thanks Bro David Archer!) and found contact details for the ecclesia in Warragul, so organised to meet with them tomorrow. After a small round of food shopping in Warragul, we drove onto Darnum where there's a free camp out the back of the Darnum Hotel. Not the quietest spot, especially on a Saturday night, but it should do the job.

See y'all tomorrow God willing!

-- Greg