More wine before we go to Kosciusko National Park

What do they say the early bird gets the worm? Well, we sure were early to start our visit to the wineries: they opened at 9 and we were there shortly after it. David wanted to visit a couple more and I was once again the designated driver. “We” sampled the big reds from the Rutherglen region (by the way we did notice the name of this town is made out of Ruth and Glen, just like our dear friends in PA).

One our taste buds (David’s mostly) were satisfied, we set off toward the Kosciusko (pronounced cozy-osko) National Park. The initial idea was to stop there, maybe hike a bit and spend the night, but the plans changed as we drove through it; first of all, we did take a different road that we intended (don’t ask, we have no idea how), then while the park was really nice, we didn’t feel it really warranted a 1/2 day, so we decided to keep going as far as we could toward the coast (technically we are a 1/2 day behind our schedule, but we are not worried about that).

David drove most of the way while in the park and it was another one of those semi-white knuckles roads. While driving around the park we saw lots of cows and sheep and the landscape reminded us of a mix between Colorado and Wyoming. We did see a couple really colorful parrots flying around…it’s so weird to see parrots “in the wild”. We also dodged an echidna crossing the road (see picture to find out what the echidna looks like).

We went by the town of Tallangatta which was “moved: in 1950s. The area needed water for irrigation and the best place to make a reservoir was were the town sat. So they moved it, and created the reservoir…and that explains all the tree you see smacked in the middle of the water. The thin line of “land” you see in the picture, used to be the railway.

We kept driving for a good 3 hours through forest of eucalyptus trees and a very large area that was obviously the scene of a bush fire: the hills around us were all gray, full of dead trees: but the good news is that you could see the new trees coming up and the underbrush looked very healthy.

Once we exited the park, we had another 100+ kilometers to go to reach the town of Cooma, where we would spent the night. We got to the campground around 6 and pitched out tent: it’s going to be a cold night, so we’ll see how that goes.

We brought our dinner in the communal rec room because it was too chilly to eat outside and we enjoyed our first bottle of wine: as you can see from the picture, we had some “Tasty” cheddar cheese and crackers with that: and they were not lying…the cheese sure was tasty (as was the wine, even in plastic glasses).