Day trip to the Otways

Yesterday I took a trip through the Otways with a friend to try out the new 2" suspension lift I had put into The General. It started raining and we didn't get a lot of pictures, but we did see a couple black wallabies as well as this echidna:

Tallarook State Forest

Recently, I joined a Meetup group that does four-wheel-drive trips. My first trip with them was to Tallarook State Forest, about an hour north of Melbourne. There isn't much story here, but the views were nice and the people were great. I'm looking forward to doing more outings with them.

I did have another trip scheduled with them a couple weeks ago, but we canceled it due to extreme fire risk. This turned out to be a wise decision, because there was a rather large fire in the area when we were supposed to have been there.

View from Mount Hickey 

Fire tower at Mount Hickey

Taken at Freeman's Camp Picnic Area
The snake was dead, but we'd walked right past it without noticing it was there

Our group

Yours truly

Mount Eccles National Park

Mount Eccles National Park is a small park in western Victoria, about 45 minutes south of Hamilton. Its namesake, Mount Eccles (or Budj Bim, as it is known among the Gunditjmara people) is a small dormant volcano. Lake Surprise sits in a fissure near the top of the mountain.

My friend Angela and I went camping out there around New Year's Day. The tracks we took were pretty well forested, so there weren't a lot of great photo opportunities. Still, it was a pleasant, relaxing trip, and a great way to spend the weekend. Also, I'm pretty sure at one point we took a wrong turn and drove down a walking track. Oops.

There were lots of kookaburras and koalas around the camp site, and they got really loud, right around sunset. Not long after, we heard something scratching around one of the trees, and saw this little guy (I think it's a common brushtail possum, Trichosurus vulpecula):

I'm not 100% sure this was on the same trip, but it's pretty cool and I don't know where else to place it: