aka R’acquel

Busy week. It’s been hard to gain the headspace to post.

My husband was away at the Ironfest Festival with Oz Whistles last weekend, so this left me the pleasure of enjoying my son for the weekend. We finally dared to attempt walking into “town”. We’re not conveniently located so close to town like the former place which was a 10minute walk, so this was quite an adventure with an estimated 45minutes of strolling ahead of us for just one way!

Stopping off at the first turn at the end of our street, to peer out at the mountains, with my son asking if there are any snakes in there.

The first major hill around the corner from where we live - the steepest i’ve encountered in this region so far, which i also refer to as the stairmaster 2000 because it feels like i’m on an exercise machine with each step.

Getting close to town and the streets are a sea of leaves. They won’t last that long with the leaf blowing machines to “clean” it all up soon…*sighs*

Just a mere 3000 steps into town, and it did take roughly 45minutes to get there. My son thought that this walk was insane, that we would never get home before dark and that we were going to die! =D The chemist was closed, the bread shop was closed, and the supermarket hardly had any items to sell as it will be closing down to make way for the construction of some kind of plaza. At least the essentials like milk & bread were still available!

Ah well, there’s always the Christmas Cottage to warm up the spirits. Can always dream of an Australian “white & snowy mountain” Christmas by walking into this shop all the time. This is the perfect shop if your family celebrates the tradition of getting a new special ornament for the tree each year.

It’s never been easy to catch the real beauty of autumn here. Mostly because the trees that make me go “oooh” tend to spring into my life whilst driving. The period of fire is fairly brief, but i managed to capture a few special moments before the beginning of it’s end for this year.

The famous “whale hedge” of our former neighbour’s garden. You can see it’s eyes & teeth emerge when the garden reaches the heights of amazing colours during spring.

The cockatoos were squawking like crazy and i’m surprised to have managed to capture a poor shot of one in midflight. They always come across as a very crazy kind of bird to me and i don’t miss them spitting the pine tree nuts on the top of our roof at the old place in the early hours of the mornings. *lol* My dream would be to capture a black cockatoo with my camera tho. I think they’re rare compared to the white one but i have seen a couple recently which was still really exciting to spot even tho i had no camera on me at the time.

Walking or driving past this street always takes my breath away - a nice big chunk of the blue mountains in yer face without needing to go on a bushwalk.

I finally knab myself a good shot of the red hot poker flower. Another tough plant to photograph due to the impossibility of stopping the car just for the sake of taking a picture. Possibly the slowest blooming i’ve spotted, as most of the ones saw their height of fire colours during the summer. This one is still fairly “green” so i look forward to watching it’s journey. I believe it’s classed as a weed here.

I did manage to spot a native bottle brush nevertheless! =D

..and despite the insanity of this long walk, my son did enjoy how his shadow was turning him into a giant. He patiently looks forward to the day of being so much taller than me. It’s quite likely that he’s going to become a 6ft’er with basketball sized shoes.

Our final descent back down the stairmaster 2000 hill with the Blue Mountains national park going “boom” at the end of it. We hanged a left, arriving at home safely, and still alive!