One Friday in June this year, we travelled from our home in Brisbane to Warwick. We went via Cunningham's Gap where we 'climbed' (read: hiked up) Mount Mitchell. It had beautiful views at the top however there were a LOT of weeds on the out and back trail. (Photo is a screenshot of my Strava app)
Sweaty and satisfied we headed to Warwick to grab intel from the Visitor's Information Centre and did a self-guided walk around town before checking in at our (great) accommodation at the Country Rose Motel. We had dinner at an Indian restaurant that I've forgotten the name of, but where the food was warm and yum!
Warwick, also known as Gooragooby, is in the Southern Downs Area on the traditional lands of the Keinjan (Aboriginal) Peoples.
The "Welcome to Winter" (onsie-themed) parkrun was our reason for visiting this regional town. We'd been planning to go to since we first heard about it years ago. We'd bought bright-coloured onsies especially for the occasion and they were great in for this super frosty (cold) parkrun!
Our Saturday continued with a costume change to something more sensible for a hike before heading north to Goomburra where we had an "active recovery" afternoon with our visits to our "Two Lookouts": Castle Mountain Lookout and Sylvester's Lookout. This was followed by the Cascades walk: a short, twisty-turny hike that crossed the same creek several times!
Then it was home for a much needed nap before dinner. After searching endlessly for gluten free options for dinner (wanting another new option for dinner on night two) we found ourselves at one of the more upmarket local pubs only to find that at 5pm they were already fully booked for the entire night!
They directed us to another pub nearby, but it was the same story over there. Warwick was clearly doing well with tourists. We found out that they usually get a flood of tourists in winter, but that with Covid restricting interstate and international travel, their tourist numbers have been through the roof!
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We decided to make life easy for ourselves and pulled into the nearby Domino's pizza place and ordered a large, gluten-free, sourdough Vegorama pizza.
Sunday called for a proper sleep in. We ditched the alarm clock (knowing that my body always wakes up early anyway) and at 6am, while it was still (literally) zero degrees outside, we finished packing, piled sensible layers on and then jumped in the 4WD. While we'd done all the tough roads that needed the higher clearance the day before we were back on the main highway again, headed for Cunningham's Gap once again.
This time our hike saw us on the north side, headed up Mount Courdeax on-route to Bare Rock (and Morgan's Walk). It was cold! So we hiked fast! The views at the top of these Peaks (2 and 3, of 3 for the trip) were fabulous and this trail had far fewer weeds and a LOT of ferns and fig trees It was really pretty and definitely worth doing if you are someone who lives in SE Qld and likes hiking up peaks.
Once we were off the mountain it was time to take these amazing, tired bodies home. Another awesome trip done.
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