Green Hill Lake Reserve - Ararat

26 – 27 March 2023

We left Rochester and continued our journey with a quick stop at Bendigo to pick up some more enhancements for the tripod. From there we detoured off our chosen route again to find a park to have lunch. As we were travelling on minor roads, there weren’t any rest areas so a detour was necessary.

We found the picnic area on Laanercoorie Reservoir and made use of the covered shelter to have our lunch out of the cool breeze. It was adequate but in a very untidy state. It is hard to understand why people would come to a lovely spot and just leave their rubbish around when there are bins available.

We continued on through Ararat and on to Green Hill Lake Reserve. This is a huge free camp on the lake, with toilets and a dump point. It was reasonably busy on a Sunday afternoon but we could imagine it would be packed on long weekends and school holidays. We lucked out and settled on a spot right on the lake, with just a short walk to the toilet block.

Friday drinks by the lake

We came to Green Hill Lake so Mick could look for a bird that had been reported recently so he spent some time in search of – unfortunately not very successfully.  The temperature dropped with the sun and we wished we had thought to bring some firewood with us. During the night it also rained quite a bit so we had to make a decision about staying, and putting up the awning, or moving on. 

More rain was forecast so there would be no bird photography if we stayed so we packed up and moved on. We were lucky that we had a short window of time with no rain so even though the canvas was wet, we weren’t. It was such a shame as this was a lovely spot – definitely one to come back to one day.