Dandenong Ranges National Park

Driving around trying to find Jim's. This wasn't much help.

Some of the 1000 steps.

 The forest at the top of the mountain.

 The path and other views on the nature trail.

Saturday, May 21^st.

I woke up late and took my time getting organized. I was invited to a brunch at Barry and Jim's place. They are the two principals from the International Teacher's Association I met when I first arrived. Bev and Carol were going too. Carol had sent me the e-mail with their address. So when I got up I decided to go and programmed my GPS. They had not told me what suburb so I assumed Melbourne, and you guessed it, after a long drive I wound up at the wrong house. I don't think that I wrote before that I had broken my phone a couple of weeks ago and as a result I had lost my contacts, including Jim, Barry, Carol and Bev's mobile numbers! Melbourne is different from Toronto in that there are lots of suburbs and they have many streets with the same name, so without the suburb you might find a number of Bellevue Streets and they are all over the city. So I had no way to finding out where their house was. I texted them by difficulty and then gave up and drove home again. I would have liked to see them, but it will have to wait for another time. I went for a bicycle ride around the neighbourhood checking out a few of the trails in the area before going back home to a quiet evening of domestic stuff, like laundry, tidying, grocery shopping while watching a bit of TV.

Sunday, May 22^nd.

Another really nice day today. It is still pretty warm and mostly sunny, but windy. I decided to go for a hike at Dandenong National Park. This is a popular park where a lot of people go for the 1000 step climb up Mt. Dandenong. This is a commemorative climb to remember a battle in Papua (now Papua New Guinea) the Second World War, when the Australians were given the job of stopping the advance of the Japanese on the island, and to honour the Australian soldiers who died there. The trail on the island was called the Kokoda Trail. The hike consisted of about a kilometre walk up hill to get to the steps. Some hike it, others jog it. Then a fairly steep and constant climb up the steps. I thought there might be a view at the top, but there was not, but there were a couple more trails to follow. I took one trail around the summit through the gum tree forest which was blowing in the wind. Then I went back down the alternate route which has no steps just a paved path. At the bottom I did another 3 kilometre hike on a trail that went up for another good climb into a 'living forest' as it was billed, and then down again back to the parking lot.

From there I drove home where I bought my groceries for the week. A bit of a quieter weekend, but I needed rest after last week and to get ready for the upcoming week of reports.