Glass House Mountains & Maleny

So, I've been sick.  Really sick.  Like, evil, death-warmed-over sick. Actually we've all been sick, four out of five of us anyway.  That makes for some pretty slow and boring days when you can barely even get off the couch. I honestly can't remember the last time we were this bad off.  It's been miserable.  The one bright spot? How else could I have caught up on almost two months worth of blog posts that have been waiting for me to get the time?

So, before the down time ends, I'll get on with another Heitzmann day trip. This one we took in lieu of our original plans to take a weekend trip to Coolangata. Our Flight Centre rep completely screwed up our reservation, so we were left in the lurch and had to come up with alternative plans.  We couldn't pull together an overnight stay at 6pm on Friday, so we jumped into the car Saturday and headed to the Glass House Mountains.

This Mountain range was named by Captain Cook during his Epic voyage along the East Coast of Australia. The peaks are rhyolite plugs created by volcanos that were active millions of years ago. The Glass House Mountains were a special meeting place for the aboriginal people, who have their own story about the mountain peaks, which talks about a family of mountains.  It's too long to share, but if you're interested, you can find the whole story here.

We started off the day with a picnic at the top of Glasshouse Mountains Lookout, where we took a quick and very pointless bush walk - there was absolutely nothing to see here - but I did get a few cute shots of Marin.

Sassy picnic queen.

Cool mosaic of Mt. Coonowrin, the most identifiable peak in the Glasshouse Mountains.

Here's the real thing.

On our bush walk.

Sweet, sweet smile.

So, we jumped back in the car and headed out to find a 4x4 track we had read about.  It ended up being what I have now termed a "white-knuckler" so we turned around before we flipped the Pajero.

This is NOT the white-knuckle part...I really can't take pictures when the 4x4-ing gets hairy. 

This is just where we started.

Not knowing where to head since our 4x4 dreams were killed, we went to the local tourist information stop and got directions to Maleny. It was a nice drive, and we stopped at an antique store on the way to Mary Caincross reserve.  The view from this reserve was amazing.  You could see the entire Glasshouse Mountain range and it was breath taking.

The Glass House Mountains.

We walked into the rainforest reserve right before dusk, so the bad part was that the lighting was too bad to take photos, the good part was that dusk is when the pademelons (pronounced paddy melons) come out to feed.  They are little kangaroo-like creatures more the size of a, well I can't think of anything similar. Suffice to say they are even smaller than the small wallaby.  Here is a photo I found online, I wish I had gotten this good a look at one. They are fast little suckers!

                                                                                                                         Photo by Noodle Snacks

When we finished our rainforest walk and headed out of the park, we decided to grab dinner at the Maleny hotel, which was the hot spot in town. Luckily we arrived early enough to grab a great seat out on the front deck and watch the sun go down before the crowd rolled in.  All in all another successful day trip to see some of the fantastic things in our backyard!