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As you may have read: yesterday was not a good day for me. Especially when I looked at the weather forecast: it’s going to rain for the next days. Add to that: a weather warning forecasting a lot of wind, low temperatures and snow in the places where I go to today.

That did it for me last night. So when I woke up this morning, I expected the worst. And then I looked out the window and guess what?

Not too bad is it? Okay, let’s do what I would have done yesterday when: walk to the Launceston Cataract Gorge. It’s only 5 minutes away from my hotel and it’s a good start of the day.

It’s still early, but there are a lot of people around here. Most of them are just enjoying the views like I do, some of them are jogging and later on I noticed that some of them are more into the adventures things.

After that I walked into town and noticed that there are a lot of people here preparing for some sort of parade. Then I found out that it’s Anzac Day. Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand to honour members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who died and served in military operations for the country. As a result all the shops are closed and all the major roads in the city are closed for a parade. No way I can get to the interesting parts here in time. I still have to drive over 200 kilometers to get to my destination for today: Cradle Mountain. Although I did not cover by far what this city has to offer, I just don’t have any more time.

The day started with nice blue skies, but by noon the first clouds came in. And that resulted in some nice views as well.

Today I have some routing challenges. I ran into closed roads due to maintenance and as a result of Anzac parades. And for some reason my Tom Tom didn’t want to talk to me anymore…

I guess this box works like this: there’s a Bloke in there that actually has the map. He tries to find the route to the destination I gave him. Then there’s a Sheila in there that will talk me through this route. But since I every now and then don’t follow the route, either because I think I now a better route or because I just can’t go there due to a closed road or whatever, this leads to a discussion between the Bloke and the Sheila. I think that at a certain point in time she states: “I will not talk to him anymore. He just doesn’t do what I tell him. I have had enough of it.”.

It took me some time to discover this because I normally only listen to the Tom Tom and hardly look at the screen. By the time I found out that something was wrong, I was already way of track. And it took me some time to figure out how to convince Sheila to talk to me again. But eventually we were back in business. Sheila was talking to me again and Bloke found the right routes.

By now I was heading to Sheffield. On my way I found some nice views as well.

Sheffield is “famous” because of the murals… Well I didn’t see a lot of them, except this one:

Moving on to Cradle Mountain I passed some nice lookouts.

By now it was time to get a move on. The clouds are thickening and if possible I would like to gather enough information to be prepared to “do” the mountains tomorrow. When getting closer to Cradle Mountain, it looked like the forest just died here. I wonder what happened here.

I was just in time to get to the Cradle Mountain information centre before they closed. Got some maps and suggestions of walks for tomorrow. And some warnings as well: make sure that you get the weather information tomorrow before you start your walks. We expect heavy rain, snow and wind… That’s going to be a nice day then! Let’s make sure that I am prepared for all that mayhem: there’s a shop at the lodge I am staying. I bought a nice jacket and some additional protection against the rain. Bring it on!

On my way back from the visitor centre I followed one of the easy walking tracks here. Well just enjoy the views.

Oh by the way, I found the resort where Bugs Bunny goes to when he’s on holiday:

It’s been a pleasant day. My mood is back to “normal”. The weather is not that good by now (it is 22:00 here and it’s pouring…). But perhaps I will be surprised with nice blue skies again like this morning. We will see.

The track of today:

Saturday 25 April 2009

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