Back on the road

After the fun and excitement of spending weeks with Sue, Jamie & family, and Rebecca, Tony & family, and Paul & Tam, and of course, our families back home, we are finally back on the road to enjoy unexpected adventures, and roads untravelled.

I want to take a moment to declare that we are all so darn lucky to live in a place as beautiful as Australia.

A stone's throw from metropolis, and you are greeted by kangaroos and wallabies who chew grass lazily at dusk. Juvenile roos play-fight in a display of muscle and determintation, then return to eating their supper. Echidnas waddle in search of food, and will pertrude their bristles if you get too close, while their pointy nose digs into the scrub to hide their little faces. The call of birds comes from all directions - the warble of a magpie and the mock-call of a parrot mimicking a bell-bird can be heard from the tops of gum trees. Hawks screech as they lay claim to their turf, and, below, smaller birds flit about on the ground closeby; little male fairy wrens with irridescent blue feathers wag their tall vertical tails as their harem of fawn-coloured wives pick at insects cooperateively.

The sun droops peacefully in the sky, bringing with it an everchanging watercolour painting of orange, mauve and gold, and on the other side of the horizon, an enormous yellow baulbous moon rises slowly, creating spindly blue shadows across the ground.

Australia's landscape in these parts is distributed between open pasture dotted with grey woolly sheep and thick forest lined with green curly bracken and straight eucalypts. Flowering gums are heavy with soft frilly pink blooms, and are food to honeyeaters, rosellas, bees, beetles and ants. The beetles here are red with eery metallic blue dots masquerading as evil eyes - we see them crawling across the sand when we take our daily walk. The air smells sweet and clean - it is wonderful to fill your lungs with it, in great deliberate inhalations.

It's no wonder we attract so many tourists who put up with living in a station wagon or van for months on end just to be here; to absorb Asutralia's sights, sounds and smells, and take home with them visions not encountered anywhere else in the world.