On our 2020 Christmas holiday trip we stayed overnight at Lismore, in Northern NSW, so we could pick up a new parkrun. We were also able to catch up with another uber tourist, John, pictured in the red top next to his cheerful sister.It was a Boxing Day public holiday and everyone, especially Conscious Cat, were in a good mood.My time was pretty slow, about 27 minutes, as we were backing up from the day before. Only 24 hours earlier, on Christmas Day we'd gone to an extra parkrun, at Lota, and then visited my family for our usual Christmas get together.The course at Lismore was 3 laps inside Riverside Park on a narrow, hilly, concrete path that's full of lots of twists and turns. Luckily, there were not a lot of people and though it was a hard course to run fast, it was great to see everybody multiple times. (Course screenshot from the Lismore parkrun Facebook course page).
Next we were off to Taree, about a four and a half hour trip south, to visit some of Caroline's family. We had a little bit of spare time up our sleeve so I decided to see if we could find the Bird Tree, one largest trees, by volume, in the state of New South Wales.
It was only about 5 kms off the main highway, but it was pretty slow going on a narrow, rutted, hilly, dirt track.
After leaving the car on Bird Tree Road it was only a short walk through some great forest scenery, complete with lots of big old trees.Caroline said she felt really small when she was inside this tree. I can understand why, it's huge!The Bird Tree is a Coastal Blackbutt, approximately 69m high, 11 metres around the tree (girth) and 200 years old. The tree was lucky to survive years of logging in the area. (Info source: Visit NSW website).The Tree is in the Middle Brother National Park which was declared a NP just to protect a number of these large magnificent trees, but it is also home to Middle Brother Mountain. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time for any more exploring that day, but maybe in the future. We kept thinking about the name... it rang a bell but we couldn't quite place it.Our walk (courtesy of Strava). We couldn't make out where the loop track went as it had become very overgrown, so we played it safe and just returned the way we came.After a lot of discussion we finally worked out the Middle Brother connection; we had been to North Brother lookout the year before, which is not too far away. And there are three "brothers" mountains, and they're all on the Mid North Coast of NSW. This was us on a trip for one of my Ironman competitions.
Interestingly, both the European Explorer James Cook and the local Traditional Custodians, the Birpai Aboriginal people, named these 3 mountain the brothers. North Brother mountain, near Laurieton, is in the Dooragan National Park. Mooragan is the Aboriginal name for Middle Brother and Booragan the name for the Southern Brother.
