Grant's Picnic Ground ~ 20/2/11

We headed out to Grant's Picnic Ground early on Sunday 20-2-11. It was a miserable looking day with rain forecast but we hoped to get in some bird feeding and bushwalking before the rain hit.

We arrived at the grounds before the coach tours got there, in fact we were the
first ones there feeding the birds! We purchased some seed at the gift shop and headed to the designated bird feeding area. There were no birds around but they had said to just scatter the seed so we did, hoping that birds would just appear as they do. After about 5mins of seed scattering some galahs appeared which William took great delight in feeding on the ground.
He was quickly surrounded by cockatoos so decided that standing was a better option and was happily hand feeding a rosealla when he was swooped by a galah! Then it was my turn ~ I don’t particularly care for birds at the best of times but it looked like fun. And it was fun, until I was covered in king parrots and roseallas and fighting off the cockatoos! I couldn’t handle it for long and so I gave the role of head bird feeder to Angus who really loved it. The birds loved him too :)



After we had finished with the seed and scrubbed our arms and hands with soap in the toilets we decided to head out on a little bush walk down one of the trails. We started out walking the Hardy Gully Nature Walk.
The start of the trail was very steep and slippery as it had been raining so the path had turned to mud. It didn’t deter us at all, we just took it slowly. It’s a beautiful walk and it was amazing to see the size of the trees and ferns. William announced that the trees must be very very very old just like daddy.
Not sure what daddy thought of that! We cut the walk short and started to head back to the picnic grounds as we could feel the rain starting and didn’t want to get caught.
When we got back to the grounds we decided that we would go to the cafe, order some drinks and eat our picnic lunch but the weather had other plans. We ordered and started to relax when the heavens opened and we had to move inside. We upgraded our order to include a bowl of wedges and sat there enjoying the view of the rain over the rainforest and I drooled over their homemade vanilla slice ~ apparently it’s famous and it looked divine. I’m going to try it next time we go back.

After lunch we bundled a tired William into the car and drove around the Dandenong ranges for a while before returning home. Unfortunately the rain stopped us doing anything else up there but it was still a lovely morning. We look forward to going back again in the future.