Part 6......... our time at Cooma

We have now been home for 2 weeks and I haven't posted about the last week of our 21 days away. Life got busy again when we returned home, and I am now prompted to catchup on newsfromjude as I have been told that Blog2print will cease printing blog books by mid May. Hence it is catchup time...................

In my last post I said we were staying at Cooma for 2 nights, but in fact we stayed 3 nights and spent 2 days touring around the area.

We started our first day at the Snowy Discovery Centre ..........

where we learned a lot about the Snowy Hydro scheme........we found this very fascinating. How they managed to map out and plan the scheme years ago over a large area, without all the modern technology that is available today intrigues me. (Perhaps modern man is not so smart after all??)

                                                      

We left the Discovery centre and drove to Jindabyne and the following photos were taken looking out at the Dam there.......

There was a haze in the distance and we wondered if it was smoke and we later found out it was.......

.......from Jindabyne we took the road to Perisher Valley and the snow fields, although it was too early in the season for snow.....

This was the countryside as we left Cooma..........

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and we arrived at the Kosciuszko National Park where we had to pay to enter.......

This is what the snow fields look like when there is no snow!! I was surprised to see how many trees were there. It looks so different to the pictures that you see on TV of the skiers on the slopes.

We followed the road from Perisher Valley right through to the end of the road at Charlotte Pass. From here there are various walks that you can take, and there were some keen people heading out into the distance, but not us!!

There was a track going to Mount Kosciuszko, but we were happy to see it in the distance. This is the highest mountain in Australia..........

.............and this is the view we had from the lookout.

...........this view is looking back towards Perisher Valley from Charlottes Pass.........

...............the roads have yellow lines instead of white in the snow areas.

I was surprised to see how 'desolate' the country was up in the mountains, and the lack of trees up high, and this sign explained why................

After the drive to Charlottes' Pass we retraced the road and took the turn to Thredbo, which is another ski field often seen in the news............

We found a chair lift which was operating to the high point. It was late afternoon when we discovered this, and also found that we could have got off at the top and taken a shorter walk to Mount Kosciuszko. Maybe another time??

the view looking down to the town of Thredbo.........

.....and the town of Thredbo from the bottom.

......and this a quick selfie photo, taken in a hurry in case I dropped the phone which would have landed a long way down. It was so cold at the top of the mountain.

We had hoped to drive to see the Eucumbene dam, but it was rather late by the time we left Thredbo. So we returned to the van at Cooma, and went to the dam the next day.

Eucumbene dam

Eucumbene is the largest of the Lakes, by volume, that make up the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme. It was formed in 1958 when the Eucumbene River was dammed. Lake Eucumbene is huge, having the capacity to hold almost 9 times the amount of water in Sydney Harbour!

This map shows just how large the area of the dam is................

After checking out the actual Eucumbene dam we drove around the lake as shown on the yellow line to the other side and the town of Adinimaby.

The valley, which was flooded following construction of the Eucumbene Dam, had been an agricultural centre since the 1830s. A number of homesteads and most of the township of Adaminaby lay within the inundation area of the proposed dam. Most of the buildings in the town relocated to a site on the Snowy Mountains Highway, but some buildings were not flooded and remain at Old Adaminaby.

From there we drove back to Cooma for another night before the next stage of our trip.

We saw about 30 of these vintage vehicles out for a drive that afternoon.

Somewhere along the way we came upon this old, well maintained church and cemetery and stopped for a look. 

The orange line is pretty wobbly but it gives you an idea of our travels over the 2 days 

We have been fortunate to experience lovely sunny days with blue skies, and very cold nights in this area. We were thankful for the heater in the van in the early mornings.

Be back with another post very soon.

Blessings, From Jude