14-15 Feb: Happy Valentines!

-
Quite some time ago we scoffed at our then-teenage children as they wandered forlornly in search of wifi while on holidays.  Well, we may be late to the party but we had plenty of time to scoff at ourselves as we wandered forlornly through the Pine Country Caravan Park in search of a decent phone signal.  I blamed the Blue Lake Crater hill for getting in the way as I gave up on any internet joys and searched the slim literary pickings in the laundry swapping library.

Valentine's Day always needs a rose.

During the day I sat in my 'office' and watched sparrows play in the hedge outside my window. Children squabbled past, frazzled parents herding them to and from the jumping pillow. After work I  walked around the Blue Lake, finding out along the way that there are actually two lakes, the Blue and Valley lakes, separated by what was once Leg Of Mutton lake and is now parkland and gardens.

The Blue Lake, being blue.

Roger came back from his forays downtown bursting with enthusiasm and horror in equal measure. Turns out Mt Gambier embraces it's position on a cave-riddled limestone plateau such that sinkholes, turned into gardens, litter the CBD and cave tours can be had in suburban parks.  The horror came from being an engineer and thinking about building things with foundations which might collapse into sinkholes at any minute, and the travails of running highways over limestone caverns which Mt Gambier does freely. We learnt later that when sinkholes do appear in the roads Mt Gambier just fills them up and carries on, having so far not lost more than the odd car or two to this philosophy.  Which might be problematic when one too many road trains rumbles over the slowly-expanding cavern under the Jubilee Highway.

We decided to stay another day in Mt Gambier to check out the sinkholes and caves and to watch the free Volcano movie which the local Gallery advertised as a 'world class cinematic event.' I can't wait.

Home for another night: Pine Country Caravan Park.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

23/12/21 The Dinosaurs of Newtown

-
Image
Some time in the months before Christmas, somewhere near Newtown, a shop had a sale of inflatable Christmas dinosaurs. Lots of people thought that a large inflatable dinosaur was just what they needed for their 2021 outdoor festive decor, so they bought the dinosaurs and then discovered that, once inflated, they were very big. Not as big as a real dinosaur would have been, obviously, but certainly big enough to be inconvenient if you happen to live in a trendy little terrace house with a handkerchief of front lawn and second story verandah almost the size of half a vegemite sandwich.   Dinosaur #1: taking up all the available verandah space I imagine that at this stage the dinosaur purchasers may have considered the size of the dinosaur (inflated or otherwise) in relation to their rubbish bin, but were likely prevented from this course of action by children who, enamoured of dinosaurs, had welcomed the creature into the Christmas fold and called it something festive like Rudolph, o...
Read more

Minor Adventures on Quiet Days

-
Image
 Roger took himself off on the train to South Australia for a week, so BD and I decided to have some adventures of our own, albeit not as exciting as riding the interstate train to Adelaide and getting to have an up-close stickybeak at the flooded Murray River. We took ourselves off to the Ormond Lookout to watch the sun set instead. As did rather more people than what we had anticipated. Mobs, in fact. We found a patch of dirt grass and settled in.  "I'm gonna come back here!" declared BD.  She wriggled around a bit: our patch of grass was on quite a slope and she kept sliding out of her shorts.  "With a chair," she added. In between admiring other people's dogs and taking observational lessons in 101 Ways To Take A Selfie, we watched the sun trundle slowly toward the horizon. No sunset is complete without a picnic. There she goes. Further down the beach, a container ship puttered across the horizon under the gaze of a lone beach-sitter.  And us, of course...
Read more

Quiet Life with Cat

-
Image
 After all the excitement of hospital stays, Emergency Department visits, and trying to balance the cost-benefit ratio of hospital cafeteria food, life became a little more settled.  After a week of blessedly boring drug levels BD was given a reprieve from daily blood tests and we, therefore, were released from daily drives to the nearest Melbourne Pathology lab.  We did some laundry and did some cleaning and I hopped on my bicycle and went for a ride or two.  Not that the weather was very conducive to enjoyable and relaxing bike riding, but I went anyway. All was fine at Albert Park, where the swans put on a good show, playing happy families all across the playing fields.  But that didn't last for long. Back at home the new cat let his crazy out to play.  He zoomed up and down the hallway in the middle of the night; scared the bejeebers out of us by jumping on the sound bar and blasting us with high volume TV; hid under chairs and batted at our ankles as w...
Read more