Australia 2019 – Day 18 – Glass House Mountains National Park

I took my time getting started because I am headed back to Brisbane, where I will return my trusty camper van. I must remember to record the number of kilometers traveled, starting with an odometer reading of 598,766 km. That is right, the old girl, whose name is Aurora, already had over half a million kilometers traversed, and I have easily added 5,000 km to that number.

I stopped in a couple of small towns, just for the sake of stretching my legs and buying munchies, but the highlight of the trip was the Glass House Mountains National Park. These are a set of 7 or 8 volcanic plugs, spines, and laccoliths formed by bimodal volcanism 30 million years ago. One is a typical basaltic volcanic plug, not unlike Devil’s Tower. Another is a trachyte laccolith, and yet another is a comendite (i.e., a peralkaline rhyolite) spine. The name Glass House Mountains was given to the three largest and more conical of the mountains by James Cook. We are pretty far inland, but he sighted the three largest ones from the coast, and used them for surveying purposes. The name comes from the very distinctive, conical glass furnaces used at the time in the manufacturing of bottles and other glass articles.

The forest that surrounds them is very pretty, and I had a good time driving and hiking there, but I had the itch of getting back to Brisbane, where I have to return the van tomorrow. Fortunately the return place, my hotel, and the airport are all within 5 kilometers of each other, so the return should go quite smoothly. The only minus is that I had to find a camping park in Brisbane for my last night, and I got to one in which the lady attendant was quite rude. I have to say that both in Sydney and Brisbane I got a bit bent out of shape by the people manning the desk, but outside of them I have had nothing but friendly and helpful encounters with everyone else in Australia. I am just going to forgive and forget, thinking that in a couple of days I will be in Cairns, facing a new adventure 😊