Climb Every Mountain

It's been quiet here for the past week. This is mostly because I have been busy not gaming, and if I'm not gaming there's not much to write about here. Those of you who have been following this blog for the past four years (and it has now been going for four years - I missed that particular milestone, once again) will know that this time of year sees my wedding anniversary, and on my wedding anniversary we go away for a few days. So stuff doesn't get posted.

This year for our trip we decided to kill two birds with one stone, and head down to the Snowy Mountains. This enabled us to visit an area we'd not really been to before and also to check up on my son in Jindabyne. He's fine; looking good and seeming to be enjoying his job. We listened to Snow FM on the way down, so finally got to hear him in action, as they don't have an online feed, like most local Aussie stations at present. It's an odd, but wonderful, feeling sitting in a cafe and hearing your son's voice come on air announcing a record, promoting a local business or doing the weather. But he really does play some rubbish music. Kids these days ...

We took our daughter with us. She stayed in Jindabyne with her brother, whilst Catherine and I went off camping in the Snowy Mountains National Park.

Here's the location of our camp:

Pretty good, eh?

We lounged round for a day, enjoying the sunshine and scenery. And then we headed out to achieve the main thing we wanted to do whilst we were here - climb Australia's highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko. It's not often you get to say that you've climbed the highest mountain in not only the country you live in, but the continent as well. But we did it. Actually it's not difficult. You get a cable-car from Thredbo halfway up, then walk for two hours - it's 6.5km (4 miles) from the cable-car to the summit, on a prepared track with little in the way of any real steep bits. There are proper toilets within 800m of the summit. If you want to climb the highest mountain on a continent, then Australia has just the peak for you*. 

Here's Catherine on the path, which is, as you can see, pretty well maintained. The scenery is beautiful, and unlike anything else we've seen in Australia. But it's going to take me a couple of weeks to sort out the photos and post them to Flickr.

And here we are on the peak, with the crowds of other people who also did it on the same day as us. I failed to walk off my tummy. That's a proper campsite full-English breakfast in there.

Anyway, having walked two hours back and having had lunch we went back to our camp, where we did actually play a game; I'd brought Memoir '44 with me.

Catherine beat me.

In other news I lost bits of my eyebrows and some of my hairline to a gas stove which decided to flare up aggressively, in an incident that was quite funny afterwards, but might not have been at the time, and we also, after seven years, finally got to see duck-billed platypus in the wild. See that first picture in this post? They aren't in it, but if you wait patiently at dawn or dusk you can see them swimming around in that bit of river. 

All in all this was a fine way to celebrate our 23 years of marriage.

*Apparently if you take Oceania as a whole, it's not the highest peak; the highest is in Papua, Indonesia. But, shush - we won't mention that.