Blue Mountains Bushwalk - Day 1

One of our big plans for this holiday was to go on an overnight bush walk to the Blue-Gum forest in the Blue Mountains. The kids had seen the Blue Mountains before but they didn't really remember them so it was the perfect opportunity to harness their hiking enthusiasm and really get a proper blue mountains experience.  

Andy, Alexa and Lyra completed our bushwalking team for this trip and Tracy, Paul and their gang saw us off from Blackheath. Actually just getting to the start of the walk was an achievement as we had to pack up all our gear from 4 nights at the cabin, assemble our camping stuff from fifty zillion bags, add a random assortment of food and then drive just over an hour from Turon Gates to Govetts Leap where the trail started.  Needless to say it was after lunch when we set off!

Luckily the walking was much faster beside the river at the bottom of the valley. The trail kept pretty close to the river banks and the river itself was adorned with beautiful and enticing looking deep pools.

We had quite a few river crossings to negotiate which left almost everyone with wet feet due to mis-steps at some stage or another. In fact we started a competition to see who would be the last person left with dry feet which Jon won by a whisker ahead of Lyra who fell (literally and metaphorically) at the final crossing. 

After a few more snack and rest breaks, we blew away the remaining kilometres and made it to the camp site at 4pm. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of our campsite with the tents up (I have spoken sternly to the photographer about this matter and he promises to make amends in future), but this is the area.

It was pretty quiet there with only a few other campers - but I'd recon it would get pretty popular with people during summer as it's a really good first-overnight-hike length walk whilst being close to Sydney too.