Australia Day 4: Water Reserves and German Volleyball

In 1976 this dam was built and this lake was a result of it

Very scenic

Today we went to Copperlode Dam for a hike from there to Crystal Cascades. Unfortunately the trailhead was closed or we just couldn't find it. So instead we had a very leisure 20 minute stroll from the visitor center to a lookout point over the dam.

Not quite our initial goal but it was still a lovely view and the first time I'd ever been to a real dam!

Interesting to think about the ecological impacts of the dam.

The resulting lake (from the dam construction) is a water reserve for Cairns. The place was rather peculiar since it has bathrooms, a play structure, a visitor center, large parking lot etc. Plenty of developed infrastructure meant to handle large groups of visitors. However there wasn't a whole lot to do there and also there was pretty much no one there. Not sure if it's because it's an off season (this is Carin's dry season) or if it was just because it was a midday on Monday.

Later in the night we went to the Esplanade for a free 1 hour volleyball lesson (remember me talking about all the awesome free things on the Esplanade from last summer in my old blog?) and that was great. We started the class at 5:30pm and then played until 9:30pm. So 4 hours of volleyball total!

Played with a whole slew of people but the group we spent that most time with were these 6 or so Germans. (There are a tons of Germans in Australia right now).
We taught each other bits of our languages (me teaching them Russian and them...well German obviously).

Also played with this very interesting mother and daughter and a few somewhat elderly (50-70 yrs old) men. Everyone was such a great sport and I loved how volleyball just brought all these random people together.

Saw a birds nest!