Glenthorne Retreat

For the second year in a row, and hopefully the start of a tradition, we ventured with family friends up to the Glenthorne Retreat to spend the weekend exploring the magnificent area that is the Avoca and Harper River confluence.

We arrived just on dusk on Friday evening and quickly got to unpacking and settling in. The kids as per usual explored inside and out with a fair bit of vigor!! Strangely the Friday night wasn’t excessively cold and in the morning there wasn’t even a decent frost on the ground. After a good bacon and egg breakfast we hatched a plan for the day which saw us walk up to Lake Lillian that morning before lunch back at the retreat. It took us about half an hour to do the walk up with the kids, only one stream crossing to manage on the way. The lake had about half its surface frozen. The piece that was frozen was fairly thick though, just over an inch. The walk back from the lake was pretty stunning as the sun had spread itself more across the valley we had views over.

After a hearty lunch we decided to go for a drive to see if we could find The Pinnacles, something we had failed to do last year. This year we found them and we were glad we did, they were pretty awesome. They are very crumbly structures so how they have managed not to be eroded away has got us scratching our head but anyway they were well worth taking the time to find and explore.

We then decided to take a 4WD track that headed up the hill between Harper river and Corner Creek. It was a fairly good track up until the last 500m or so when it got a bit more agricultural. Still the Landcruiser managed it no worries. This gave us great views over the confluence of the Avoca and Harper rivers and all the surrounding terrain, very impressive.

Our final activity for the day was shooting. We set up some targets and balloons for the kids to have a go with the .22. They loved it, and even shot pretty well with all the kids hitting their target with some surprising accuracy!! Next came the grownups turn, last year we (Jolie and I) had been shown up by our friends and i’m sure some redemption was necessary. Balloons were popped and mostly all the rounds hit their intended target. To finish the shooting, the .270 had a few rounds put through it at a target 200m away. The .270 is certain a bit of a step up from the open sighted BSA!! The shooting was thoroughly enjoyed by all. Bow and arrows will be needed next year to mix it up I think!!

That ended the days activities and back we went to the Retreat for some well earned tucker.

The next morning saw a good frost on the ground and us packing up to head on back to civilisation.

It was a fantastic weekend and we will certainly be back.