Day 55 - Lake Burbury - Queenstown
Sunday, 23 March 2014Into Queenstown, to see if there is a room for the night at The Empire Hotel. Noticed the old building when we passed through before. Old but not fancy is the theme, apart from the old staircase, which is one of those Trust Heritage listed things. The Blackwood being sent to England to be made into the stair case! then returned. I counted 23 carved Newell posts!
Having secured a room, we set off to find the track to Pillinger. Our friends Inara and Lange had said it was wonderful. Follows and old railway line beside the Bird River that runs into the top end of Macquarie Harbour. Pillinger was started (by a rival, Mr Crotty) to ship Queenstown's copper out of Macquarie Harbour. Mr Kelly built the, now Wilderness Railway to Strahan. The once thriving township of Pillinger only functioned for a few years and went into disrepair when me Crotty took a trip back to the UK and died. Mr Kelly bought the company out and Strahan became the main port.
We packed up some food, and set of for the 5km trip to Pillinger. Met up with another couple, locals, who not only new so much interesting stuff, Gerald was among other things a train buff (who had his ticket to drive them as well). He had also done a stint in Antarctica. Well HH was absolutely delighted with his company.
The walk was through rain forest, with glimpses of the river. It passed quickly having great conversation with someone so I interesting. Also his wife was not a fast walker so I could keep up. We got to the old site of the township and managed to have lunch before the weather deteriorated. We could see the rail coming in from the jetty. The old brick kilns here (3 sets of ruins) were huge. I forget the exact number but well over 300,000 could be fired at a time!
I wasn't keen to hang around in the wet, so we said our goodbyes and headed back. By the time we got back to the car I had walked over 20,000 steps on my pedometer (huh, what a waste, I only need to do 10,000 a day) but from thigh down I was drenched. Miserable, hate it. But for the thought of a hot shower and drying out at The Empire I would have been even grumpier :)
We checked in, hot showered and draped all our wet stuff around the room under the heaters. A nice dinner in the lovely high ceiling old dining room before retiring to watch the latest episode of Blacklist, woo hoo.
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