Sunday

Deb having arrived back from her conference on Saturday, we went out for a Sunday Drive. The Upper Yarra Valley beckoned again, because it is gorgeous and only an hour away from our front door.

After miserable weather all week, we had glorious spring weather on the weekend. Saturday it was sunny and 27°C (81°F) while on Sunday it was still sunny and still a respectable 22°C (72°F). 22° is warm enough for this Aussie to leave his coat in the car (although not leave his sweater behind).

We shot out to the park at the Upper Yarra Reservoir.
We sat at this funny little table in the park to eat.
I've included a picture showing the detail of one of the tree trunks. Unlike the deciduous trees of the northern hemisphere most of ours are evergreen Eucalyptus species. Instead of shedding their leaves in autumn many of our trees shed bark as they grow in the warmer months.
For those of you who live in the US you can see trees similar to this in California. California has millions of Sydney Blue Gums that have run wild. They are beautiful trees but they are a weed in California and they are part of the reason for the extreme wildfires they get there. Eucalyptus oil is highly flammable!

As a by the bye the fires in Portugal a while ago were also burning in Blue Gum forest. My brother who is a UK resident and holidays in Portugal says Blue Gums are so widespread there that a lot of the locals don't even realise they are not native to Portugal.

Near the picnic area is an old waterwheel.
The wheel is an original one from the 1870's. The frame and flume are mock-ups from when the wheel was moved here. Originally the wheel was used to run a lighting generator and stamper battery for a gold mine near here. When the mine closed down the wheel and lighting plant were bought by an enterprising local publican to light his hotel.
Finally in the 1950s the pub was due to be flooded when the dam was built so the wheel was salvaged to act as a sort of memorial to earlier times.

After lunch we meandered back along the valley towards Warburton. On the way we stopped to see another relic of gold mining in the area. The "Big Peninsula Tunnel", I posted about this tunnel's little sibling a while ago.
The "big" tunnel was cut for the same reason, to allow a section of the Yarra's bed to be mined for alluvial gold.

To get to the tunnel you climb down the side of a ridge and come to the river where the Parks Authority has installed an unusual means of getting across: Then you come to the tunnel which is a lot larger than its downstream mate:
Just for a change I got out from behind the camera to have a closer look:
Back in the car we headed towards Melbourne, stopping a couple of times to take advantage of the afternoon light to snap a couple (of hundred) photos.Warburton lies about 20 km (12 miles) behind the low ridge in the middle distance.
And just because I love this piece of countryside so much a final photo.
Mount Donna Buang is the third mountain (at the back) on the left-hand side. To give some sense of scale the black dots near the right hand side are cows.

As an interesting (and probably useless) piece of trivia the blue tinge the mountains show here is a result of a fine out-gassing of Eucalyptus oil from the leaves in the warm weather. Not surprising they're so flammable!