Other than the fossicking, which was fun, Richmond turned out to be a bit disappointing for us. All the accommodation was booked out and the caravan park was using the car park at the racecourse as overflow – we politely said no to camping in a gravel car park and asked for our money back and moved on. On top of all that we discovered a crack in one of the plumbing fittings on the trailer so lost a tank full of water.
We ended up camping on the side of the road somewhere north of Hughendon, which was certainly cheaper than the racecourse car park and worked out well. We were just south of Porcupine Gorge, which we hadn’t had heard of but we saw it on the map so decided to go an investigate.
First stop was a look out over the gorge and it is very impressive.
Having seen the gorge from above we decided we had to drive a little further down the road to a campsite from which there is a walk down into the gorge. Thankfully the gorge walls weren’t as steep as they were at the lookout and it was a relatively easy walk of about 1.5km down to the river. We ended up spending most of the morning there and had a great time playing in the river and just generally lazing around.
The campsite looked nice and we’ve taken a note that if we’re ever back that way we should stay for a few nights and explore further up the gorge.
For our campsite that night Izzy had found a promising looking place on WikiCamps called Woodleigh Station. We’ve found a number of great spots to camp on private land and this was one of them. We were worried we’d spent too much time at Porcupine Gorge to get there at a reasonable time but we made it. It was a very pleasant camping area by the river that runs through the station. There were a couple of other groups there but it certainly wasn’t crowded. The kids had a great time the next morning playing on a couple of rope swings with the kids from one of the other groups.
Only down side was that we broke one of the poles on our tent when we were putting it up – we had a bad couple of days for breaking things!
