/For our wedding anniversary Mardi and I decided to go back to where we first eloped; a small cottage retreat in the Victorian Yarra Ranges, near Cathedral Mountain, called Kingbilli. We first discovered it just googling around for places to elope, I dont think their website has changed much! But it has llamas, and is across the road from Cathedral Range State Park, what more could you want!

Apple Maps Link - Google Maps Link

We drove over, spending a night at Horsham along the way. On the way we stopped at Mount Arapiles (Google, Apple). There's a few different walks and things to see around there, so we checked out Mitre Rock first (simply cos we drove past it first)

After that we went into the Arapiles park itself and tried out Pharos Gully. When we got there we thought we could hear voices echoing around the valley - this is when we learned that the park is favoured by rock climbers.

We didn't quite make it to the top - but we chatted with some friendly climbers making their way down, and saw a friendly Stumpy.

We stopped the night at Horsham; it's always weird seeing a "small country town" that are significantly bigger than those in SA. They seem to have so much more resources and infrastructure that I spent time pondering it. (My best guess is these towns are founded on actual productive fertile farmland that have active and running waterways, compared to SA which aint as good).

We stayed at a cabin in the caravan park, which is right next to the Wimmera river.

On our way from Horsham we stopped at Bendigo for lunch - it's a nice little town, I want to go back in Autumn now.

After that we finished the drive to our final destination. The cottage and gardens around it felt a little enchanted, with lots of ponds, bridges, gazebos, and of course llama

The property has a few paddocks that are primarily used as an animal sanctuary - there's a long list of native fauna (bandicots, wombats, etc) that reside there, but we only had one evening to explore. Sadly the closest we got was the possum living (loudly) in the cottage roof.

We did get time on the first night to climb the giant hill behind our cottage and catch the sunset. It was a steep hill but the view was phenomenal.

Day 3

This day we decided to see some sights, so first hit up Cathedral Range State Park - there are a variety of hikes you can do, ranging from "Can do with your nana" to "Don't bring a backpack because it'll get stuck in the crevasse you need to scramble through to get to the summit"

We drove up to the (almost) top for lunch and to see how hard a Grade 5 hike would be - I could have physically done it, but only fell short by probably about 50m or so. You need really good shoes and backpack with water, but I only had my camera sling bag, which is not ideal if you have to scramble up rocky inclines. 

After naps we drove the 20minutes to Marysville and near Yarra Ranges National Park - in the photos on their site it's a paved road, but maybe the fires wiped it out, because it was gravel and single lane and scary as heck.

We first visited Keppel Falls, which is about a 30minute walk through a thick fern lined path

We then visited Stevenson Falls - it's main feature is it's artificially lit after dusk, so we tried to time our visit for sunset. There was a lookout above the falls, but I only discovered it closed in the last 50m (probably something you'd think would be signed at the bottom of the track, but doesn't matter).

The last day was basically a big (exhausting) drive home - but it was a great time, perfect way to celebrate 20 years married.