A Day In The A Blue Mountains.

Thanks for visiting my blog. I welcome you to take your time and browse , visiting my bush garden and discovering the wonders of my city within a national park; Blue Mountains National Park. Via my blog you will travel with me through the successes, trials and tribulations of gardening on a bush block. I share with you my patchwork & quilting, knitting, paper crafts, cooking and life in general.

Monday 28 July 2014

Sunset Spectacular

I just wanted to share with you the most spectacular night sky I think I've ever seen.
Right here, in our back yard.






Skies such as these have been spotted all along the south east coast of Australia tonight.
I hope you enjoy the photographs.

Everywhere A Sign #2


On our road trip, in 2010, we came across a number of novelty road signs relating to our unusual wildlife here in Australia.

But until this year, I didn't know we had elephants at Scotts Head!

Sunday 27 July 2014

Everywhere A Sign #1

On our recent road trip Mr HP and I came across a few engaging signs which I enjoyed photographing.  
I'm going to share a few of them on my blog. Most of the signs have their own unique story behind them while I found others self explanatory but a little bizarre (in my humble opinion).

There's a place in Australia (well, one could hardly call it a town, or even a village... perhaps a settlement) called Innamincka. It's up the Strzelecki Track (yes, here in the desert the roads are called tracks)from Lyndhurst.  Mr HP and I visited Lyndhurst in 2010. That was an experience in itself. In the outback, communities are ruled by the elements and 2010 had experienced a late wet season. In the northern part of Australia it said that there are only two seasons in a year: the wet season, and the dry season.
The wet season occurs in the spring/summer months, and the dry season in autumn/winter.

 Because of the late wet, many of the roads were closed in the winter of 2010 and this  limited the places we could visit.  For us, in 2010, Lyndhurst was the end of the road (although I walked along it for about a hundred metres...I wasn't coming all that way to say I hadn't been along the Strzelecki Track!)

So four years later, we arrive in Innamincka along with what must be scores, if not hundreds of other tourists.  Here we find a Trading Post, and a hotel. There are coin operated showers and a toilet block in the car park.
 On the outskirts of the 'town' there is an 'airport' as well as a town common which is a free camper's haven alongside the Cooper's Creek.  It's a fisherman's dream to fish along the river's bank and entire families make this a destination.

At Innamincka, the hotel, not surprisingly, is called Innamincka Hotel.
The Innamincka Hotel has a beer garden which is called....outamincka bar & beer garden.

At Innamincka, there's a bar called Outamincka...

The play on words took a while to click but when it did, well, I thought it was cute!

Unfortunately, being not yet lunch time, the bar was closed so we partook of morning tea in the hotel, where everything comes with a sprinkling of dust...and an enormous amount of generosity as you can see from the size of the serve of ice-cream I received with my affogato...

I asked for an affogato....

...but then, the size of my serve of ice-cream may have something to do with the temperatures out here...in the desert...

You can see the shower block, on the right behind the screen.  A number of concrete water tanks have been transformed into 'buildings' to house the toilets and showers.

because it looks like the roads aren't only closed because of the wet,
 but also during the summer because of temperature extremes(40-50'C)!

And oh!...we have a saying here in Australia...avagoodweekend and don't forget the Aerogard.. the flies are so bad out here they would carry you away if you let them!

Saturday 26 July 2014

Winter In The Desert

We're back from our road trip and I've been neglecting my blog along with everything else.
Monday 14th July saw us back in Sydney.  
It was a great trip, but what can I say but it gets cold out there in that darn desert in the middle of winter!
Then we spent Friday night in the city...Sydney University to be exact, to attend our darling future DIL's graduation. If we thought it had been cold before...we were now experiencing an Arctic Blast!
So guess what...I came down with a flu so bad I've been in bed ever since.
I'm blogging this from my bed.
Mr HP has brought me breakfast-in-bed; porridge (screwed up face...I eat it because it's GOOD for me), and an affogato.  Thanks Honey!
Blogging while we were away was almost impossible...well impossible for about seventy five percent of our trip.  I know readers from other countries might find it incredulous that here in Australia there are places that are so remote that there is no mobile telephone coverage unless you use satellite telephone. Also our major telco appears to have a monopoly on certain regions of our vast country so that unless you have an account with them, well, you don't get coverage.  We had planned to buy a pre-paid  SIMcard from them before our trip but, well, we just didn't get around to it.  Even so, I'm not quite sure how much blogging I would have achieved via a pre-paid but in the end, well, we just made do.

So, I'll bring you little snippets of our amazing trip over the next few days, weeks, and maybe even months.


 The day before we started our trip, Tuesday 24th June, it snowed in the mountains.
Our first stop on Wednesday was in Lithgow.
Even the poor sparrows were feeling the cold...here they are, missing out on their usual tidbits because diners were all keeping warm indoors. 
The poor little things, all fluffed up, looked like pom poms.



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