Friday 1 Feb 2019

So yesterday was a day off in Tenterfield. Breakfast at the bakery, another coffee somewhere else, visiting with people, a visit to the railway museum, drinking port mixed with sparkling or soda water. Oh it is so easy to fill a leisure day!

The railway station was built in 1884 and has been beautifully restored by volunteers, as have been a number of locos, coaches, freight cars, and heaps of tools and other parafernalia.

Dinner at the Commercial Boutique Pub where I found a pale ale from Deepwater Brewery, so far the nicest beer I’ve tasted in Oz.

And today I followed the New England Highway to Deepwater. It really wasn’t bad, pretty scenic actually and the amount of traffic was tolerable.

There is potential for another great rail trail between Tenterfield and Glen Innes. Interesting that the rails are still there, even though the tracks are very overgrown with vegetation and even trees.

Bluff Rock, site of another huge massacre of Aboriginees because they were trespassing on a station’s “property”.

Deepwater must have been a bigger community in the past to have it’s own theatre. Now it only has a population of about 300.

I checked in at the Longhorn Pub, which is a funky place, constantly renovating, but they offer free camping in the back with use of toilets and shower.

Or you can use this innovative urinal.

I had to visit the Deepwater Brewery, which turned out to be a very small micro brewery. They did have the pale ale that I already tasted in Tenterfield yesterday, but regretfully were out of all their 4 different IPAs! But I had a great visit with the owner.

Tomorrow off to the Mann River Nature Reserve where I reconnect to the BNT and then on to Ebor, but it’ll be 4-5 days before I get there. I’ll have to detour around the Guy Fawkes River, as I’ve done before (twice actually), and after Ebor I’ll do some more detours to go around the Macleay River Valley. I went through there 20 years ago, it was a fantastic experience, but I have learned to recognize my limitations……

Total 50k 3:50h 640m+ 575m-