Nimmons Bridge

I'd seen photos of Nimmons Bridge and really wanted to see it for myself, so scheduled a picnic stop on my pre-birthday itinerary. I'm good, eh?!

Nimmons Bridge is a very impressive hand-built wooden trestle bridge, built in the 1850s for the rail service during the gold rush.

It is one of the largest bridges of it's kind in Victoria and remains in use as part of the Ballarat-Skipton rail trail, a 53 kilometre cycleway.

Fortunately we didn't have to exert ourselves too much to view the bridge - and there was a picnic table very close to it.

We stopped for lunch - and were greeted warmly by a three-legged dog that lived in one of the nearby houses!

After lunch we strolled across the bridge and then walked along the bottom track to admire the structure from below.  Wow!

Devil's Kitchen

I'd read about Devil's Kitchen a while ago and decided to put it on the itinerary for my birthday prelude picnic outing.

The information I read was on a rock-climbing site, so most of the notes were concerned with climbing - whereas we just wanted to see the rocks.

Well, most of us were happy to view the formations from ground level.  As usual, Vaughan was keen to scale higher!

No-one else was climbing when we visited. There were a couple of other small groups wandering about.  Some were walking their dogs and others were collecting rocks.

There are no facilities at the kitchen, so we headed further along to seek a loo and picnic spot.