Leura and The Blue Mountains

For the last couple of nights we’ve been living in a quirky place called The Old Dairy on the outskirts of Leura in the Blue Mountains. It’s a modern development but 95% made out of recycled materials — we’ve been staying in their “Buttercup Barn” — a cozy little hideaway.

The Blue Mountains are about an hour and half’s drive outside of Sydney and I visited them when I was backpacking 11 years ago. Mel never made it, and Wills never existed!

Leura itself is a sweet little village with some quaint and quirky little shops and cafés with leafy roads and beautiful colonial-style houses. Since Melbourne it’s probably the busiest place we’ve been to, but it’s actually quite refreshing to be somewhere with a bit more going on!

The main attraction in the area is obviously the mountains themselves and there are lots of walking tracks in the area — not something immediately accessible with a toddler, however in Katoomba, the next town along, there is the rather cringely-named Scenic World. It’s not actually a naff theme park but is an attraction built around the Scenic Railway which, as well as being the world’s steepest railway, was originally built to haul coal out from mines at the bottom of the cliff face that runs along the length of the towns in the area. It has now become a tourist attraction taking people up and down into the rainforest at the foot of the cliff and Wills absolutely loved it. Once in the rainforest, there was a lovely board walk which took us to a cable car which, in turn, hauled us back up the cliff — all with spectacular views of the Three Sisters rocks. Another cable car carried us along the cliff face from where we had a short walk to the Katoomba Cascades — William thoroughly enjoyed having a clamber around on them with his daddy!

After leaving Leura and heading into Sydney we thought we’d stop and walk the Charles Darwin Walk in nearby Wentworth Falls. We’d been told beforehand that it was a nice walk for kids to do and were expecting something in the same vein as the Kid’s Garden in Melbourne, but in fact it was a proper 5 km walk to Wentworth Falls themselves and back — all along a small stream and out to the falls themselves which were quite hairy with a steep drop. Very pretty but quite hard in parts with a little boy on your shoulders and not the easy little stroll we were expecting!