Along on the honeymoon

The post wedding week started with a bit of stress as Ronan's other brother and his wife were due to leave for England but were being royally foiled by the ash cloud, they headed back to Melbourne anyway hoping it would all sort it self out (hmmm....).

Bless Jarlath and Pip, they sacrificed going on their honeymoon for a week to spend it in the mountains with us. They even invited us all around the day after their wedding for a bbq at their amazing honeymoon pad, the romance was quickly destroyed by a session of balcony cricket that I am amazed didn't end in a broken window.

We left the newlyweds for a little peace next day to get our first taste of the mountains the next day with a trip up the seemingly endless windy road to mount buffalo. it was a little 8k walk but it seemed pretty long to me at the time, I was gonna have to seriously step up my game for NZ! Still get got some fab views and watched the sunset from the wonderfully named 'horn' and encountered wallabies and owls on the way back down the dusky mountain.

We had some fantastic evenings at the homestead, it was a proper outback affair with a huuuge porch and one of those bbq that can cook food for about 20 people at one, at it did do that a number of times, I consumed by bodyweight in sausages I think! We also sampled a lot of the great local wines as well.

It was Jarlath's birthday that week and his celebration of choice, a walk in the mountains and staying the night in an unheated back-country hut. The Leydens are weird but who am I to argue so we set off for apparently one of the best walks in Victoria and it certainly didn't disappoint. 

The weather was seriously moody with deep dark cloud hanging over the hills but it really only served to enhance the drama of the landscape, all the hills were covered with plants that had been burnt in forest fires. We made it up the peak we were aiming for though we couldn't see a thing at the top due the cloud and the clouds finally broke on our way back down to soak us just in time to get to the hut, luckily this did mean that we saw the most perfect sunset.

So started an interesting evening. We thought we would have the hut to ourselves but arrived to find a slightly drunken and rambling man called Howard in a boiler suit from the 70s, he was seriously old skool hiker who used firelighters to heat his food and seemed pretty pleased to have found a captive audience to talk at. At the time he got seriously on my nerves but looking back he was pretty amusing, he repeated everything he told us at least three times in slightly different ways and seemed to believe he know all there is to know about the mountains carefully ignoring the fact that Jarlath also knew everything he was telling us. We escaped to our sleeping bags at about 9pm.......

The week seemed to fly by and on a seriously rainy Saturday we headed back to Melbourne to head our separate ways.