The Blue Mountains

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This post is long over due...about a month and half over due to be exact. However, Ron and I loved our time in the Blue Mountains so much that we wanted to share our pictures and memories with you. We decided to spend our last weekend in Australia visiting the Blue Mountains, which are about an hour and a half drive north of Sydney.

We stayed in a town called Katoomba, which is near the famous Three Sisters rock formation in the mountains, (more about them later). During our weekend there, we went on a very intense (no exaggeration!) hike through the mountains on a path along the cliff to Echos Point, which is where the Three Sisters are located. We then hiked down to the base of the mountains, where we trekked through the Australian bush. By this point, we were no longer on a guided trail so to speak, so Ron can testify that I was utterly terrified at what sort of creature we might encounter or that we might go missing. Apparently, several people go missing each year in this area of the Blue Mountains, but we took our chances. We hiked through the valley through what appeared to be rainforest where we came across several beautiful waterfalls. It was absolutely amazing and incredibly beautiful as you can see in the pictures. The difficult part came when we had to climb back up to the top of the mountains. Uff! What a work-out! Ron considers it the equivalent of doing 10,000 lunges or so it felt anyway. We definitely embraced the challenge and were thankful for the wonderful experience.

As mentioned above, here's a little background information on the Three Sisters and the legend behind them. We hope you enjoy learning about them as much as we enjoyed experiencing them up close.

The Legend
The Aboriginal dream-time legend has it that three sisters, 'Meehni', 'Wimlah' and Gunnedoo' lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe. These beautiful young ladies had fallen in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, yet tribal law forbade them to marry. The brothers were not happy to accept this law and so decided to use force to capture the three sisters causing a major tribal battle. As the lives of the three sisters were seriously in danger, a witchdoctor from the Katoomba tribe took it upon himself to turn the three sisters into stone to protect them from any harm. While he had intended to reverse the spell when the battle was over, the witchdoctor himself was killed. As only he could reverse the spell to return the ladies to their former beauty, the sisters remain in their magnificent rock formation as a reminder of this battle for generations to come.