Oatmeal for breakfast, yummy with honey. Stopped at visitor's center, bought gloves, earbands, etc. Then we drove out to Dove Lake and parked. Signed the walk registration book, D peed, and we were off. We took a "rough and steep" route to Marion's lookout. At the first intersection, we ran into a few older ladies and chatted for a bit. After telling her our plans to go to Marion's lookout, she said her name was Marion, and we thought that was an interesting coincidence. The "rough and steep" part of the trail was just that. Very steep and rough going. But it only lasted about 45 minutes or an hour and when we were done, we were almost all the way to the lookout. It felt great to get so high so quickly. Every step felt like an accomplishment. Plus the technicality of the trail took your mind off the physical difficulty. The unfortunate part was that it was raining and the wind was BLASTING at the lookout. So after about 3 minutes there, we were off to Kitchen Hut and possibly the summit of Cradle Mountain. After about an hour hike, D was at about an 8 and we needed to get to the Kitchen Hut for it's toilet. We traversed a number of knee deep snow fields to get there and finally arrived. No toilet in sight. We asked the people that were there and they had no idea of any toilet nearby. D saw a sign on the hut that said the toilet was 100 meters down a track nearby so we asked if they knew the track, but they didn't. Luckily a guy saw another structure nearby and we scrambled over more snow to get there. It was the toilet and D was happy. We found our way back to the hut, chatted with a family following the Overland Track (a popular Tasmanian multi-day hike), and then ate our lunch, pre-prepared PB&Js. After lunch, we decided to NOT try for the summit. We had no snow equipment and were not prepared to get over the amount of ice we thought was up there, not to mention the low cloud cover and that the view may be weak at best.
So we started down the face track, which would bring us to the west side of Dove lake and back to our car. But then D remember that the face track was closed from our trip to the visitor's center. We later found out that the trail was very narrow at some points because of rock falls. We could've made it through, but it would have been scary. Regardless, we went back a different way to the car park that we thought might have less snow. Boy were we wrong! We ended up walking across much larger snow fields, although there were less of them. We stopped at Cradle peak, which was gorgeous and the views were spectacular. The sun had started to peek out by this point, but the winds weren't too bad, which the important piece. We met some guy who had sold his business and decided to travel throughout Australia for a year. Sounded nice to us...
We decided on taking the long way back to the car, which may not have been the best choice after 4 hours of hiking already. We saw Cradle falls, which were very cool and then started the long hike back. After about an hour and a half, both of us were exhausted. We felt like our legs were just going to stop working. Finally we found Lake Lilla, which was a sign that we were close to the carpark. We said hello to the lake a few times because we were a bit delirious at that point. We made it back to the car and then headed straight to the Chateau because we were very hungry. D had salmon, which was decent, but the pumpkin soup appetizer was awesome. I ordered wedges with sweet chilli. It turned out to be potato fries (in wedge shape) with a small bowl of sweet and sour sauce. It was pretty good, but I didn't even make a dent in it. We asked to wrap it up and turns out you can't do that in Australia. National law prohibits taking food from a restaurant. Something to do with food poisining or something. The waiter was very nice and chatted with us a while after apologizing for it. In fact, when we left, he said he'd miss us and we should come back. We never did.
We went back to the room and watched Reign over Me in bed. At least I did. D fell asleep about 3/4 of the way through.
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