Cradle Mountain

Yesterday Deb took me to Paradise! Today she took me to the Promised Land and Nowhere Else.

We left Penguin today in bright sunshine with very few clouds in the sky. It was really warm and I didn't even have a jumper on. The temperature was about 12 degrees. Deb rang the Visitors Centre at Cradle Mountain to see what the weather was like and they advised that at the time it was cloudy but could change at any time to either very cloudy or bright sunshine. It was decided that it was one destination that we should see so away we went.

The road to Cradle Mountain from Penguin went through some very scenic back roads. I decided that we would try and avoid some of the roads that we took yesterday down to Sheffield and Railton so that we would have some different scenery to look at along the way. It was reasonably successful as we only went down a few roads again, a couple of which we went in the opposite direction.

Along the way we went through a couple of localities that I wanted to visit. I like unusual town or locality names ever since I found that there was a town in Queensland called Muckadilla. The places in Tasmania I wanted to visit were Paradise, visited yesterday, Promised Land and Nowhere Else. I visited the last two today.

Cradle Mountain was definitely worth the visit. It was raining, windy and sunny all at the same time. The temperature when we were there was 5 degrees with the wind gusting to at least 200 km per hour, or at least that is what it felt like. I didn't have an anemometer with me but I reckon that the wind speed would have been about 20 km/h which would have given an effective temperature of 1.4 degrees. (I checked on Google).

While we were having a look at a replica of a cabin used by one of the pioneers in the region a wombat just happened to walk by. He didn't seem to take any notice of us even when Deb chased after him through the bush. He just waddled along.

The scenery is tremendous. Even with the rain which wasn't heavy and the breeze which was blowing well we saw lots of stuff that we would see nowhere else. There is so much water flowing in all the little creeks and streams. The ranger at the visitors centre told us that they get on average 3 metres of rain a year. Some other interesting statistics are that 7 out of 10 days it rains, 8 out of 10 days it is cloudy and 1 out of 10 it is sunny. I feel sorry for the helicopter charter service based here. It would be nice to take some of the rain home with us to make things look a little bit like it is down here. Green!!!
We visited a gallery of photographs at the Cradle Mountain Chateau on our way home. They were magnificent. There are 10 rooms each with about 20 photographs in each. The average size was 80 cm X 50 cm. We could have purchase prints of each of them for between $440 and $1100. Would have been nice but I think with the 1224 pictures that Deb and I have taken so far we are more than likely to get at least one of the same quality. I think that at least one of my pictures of the blow hole at Bicheno will be nearly as good. I'll just have to get a good frame.
The trip back to Devonport was in bright sunshine which appeared as we cleared the Cradle Mountain National Park. We can't complain about the weather because we have been able to see everything that we wanted even though we had to modify the way we did it.

We are going to have a quiet day around Devonport tomorrow. We might go to the Don Railway and then have lunch with Judy and Henry.

Let you know in tomorrow's blog.

Den.