Tag Archives: sunrises

Australia, Collector, NSW

Sunrises and Sunsets

The last few weeks have seen an amazing number of great sunrises and sunsets. Some of it is held by the fact that dawn and dusk are now at sensible viewing times but you need clouds for both and that’s something we often lack. However we’ve been having a lot of cloud cover of late at least during the day, clearing at night for the temperature to drop only to reoccur soon after dawn.

Not much else has happened over the last few weekends because Stuart had been busy with work. I’ve completed my rehab and been discharged. Stuart is still having weekly blood taken. Hopefully he’ll soon get his levels down to a sensible figure and we can get Saturday mornings back. This weekend is another public holiday so whilst we had planned to go camping again this weekend we’re not so certain that it’s a good idea now. Sydney is due to be 28°C this weekend which is hot for this time of year. We’re only a fortnight away from the official beginning of winter!

One other bit of exciting news happened at the end of last week. With our visa due to expire next April, we’d been looking at what extensions to it were available. None because shortly after Stuart was granted it back in 2016, the visa we came over on was abolished. So we needed to apply for its replacement which only lasted 2 years or another visa. The only obvious alternative was a Permanent Residency visa. But listening to people asking questions about it on FB it sounded like it would take years to obtain it. So we started to investigate and found out that it had to be applied for before Stuart was 50 yrs old. So 1 week before his birthday, we submitted the application via an agency his work use to facilitate these applications. We were called for a medical much earlier than we had expected, in fact within 5-6 weeks of submitting the application. We never really expected to get it because of my health so we did nothing to hide any of my health problems. Last week we got the news through. 2 months 1 week after submitting the application and 3 years since leaving the UK, we’ve been granted a permanent residency visa. It goes without saying that we were surprised.

Last weekend was also the wool expo on Canberra. We didn’t know what to expect but there were plenty of stalls from handmade crafts and loads of wool stalls, some fibre stalls and a few catering vans as well. Wool ranged from sheep through to yak, silk, alpaca, llama, possum and dog. Possum yarn is the latest thing from New Zealand desperately trying to deal with the massive numbers of non-native wildlife in the country. Apparently there are 4.4 million people in New Zealand and a massive 70 million possum! It’s the brushtail possum from Australia. Dog hair and well anything like that including cat is one of the latest things in the crafts market. I’m not that certain about it to be perfectly honest.

Anyhow Stuart was very patient and I was very careful with what I spent, honest. Stuart purchase me a book called Silk Road Socks at Christmas and is been looking for suitable yarn for socks from the book. I now have a good selection along with a hand carved wooden bowl to keep a ball of yarn in (when the yarn is in use) and 2 bags of fleece for spinning. One is the softest merino and the other a beautifully soft alpaca.

Australia, Ben Boyd NP, NSW

Stuart’s Birthday Holiday, Part 5a

The big day had finally arrived. It just wasn’t dawn yet. In fact, it was still pitch dark.

Stuart wanted to see dawn in walking along the beach. And so instead of a lie in, instead of a nice comfortable bed, instead of breakfast in bed etc, his birthday alarm call was before it was even light. By the time we had done our teeth and (very quickly) got clothes on, it was starting to get light and by the time we made it to the beach and down to the water, it was almost light. But the sun wasn’t shining on us yet, it was stuck behind a cloud bank on the horizon, so he did actually get to see it “rise”.

And although it took a very long time, we made it to the far end of the beach.

Birthday boy. He went via a hairbrush when we got back to camp!

I found these two photos on his phone, so included them.

It took even longer to get back to camp.

One the where there, I came across this lovely patterning in the sand.

This image also came off Stuart’s phone but shows the size of our next surprise.

A Superb Lyrebird with its amazingly long tail was walking around the campground add though humans didn’t exist. It wasn’t very bothered about us at all.

Sadly it was still too dark under the canopy to get any really decent photos of it.

And then there was breakfast, watched carefully by that male kangaroo.

Stuart had decided that he wanted sausage and eggs for breakfast, so we had sausage and eggs with bread. We couldn’t quite (easily) manage the toast part. And this is the you’re doing what face!

Now for that roo.

With that, we started to pack up and get ready to move on. We wanted to go to the lighthouse at the very tip (bottom tip) of this bit of land and, well the weather was currently good…

But this campground had one more surprise in store for us before we left. With a final toilet trip, whilst waiting for Stuart, I was reading a noticeboard when I heard and spotted the longer grass and ferns between sites moving. Intrigued, but very wary, I moved closer until I could see what it was. Whatever it was, it was large and quite slow moving. It was between our site and the next one. Finally it showed itself in a small gap. It was a large lizard of some kind which set about climbing up a tree when Stuart arrived. But it disappeared before we could get a camera. We pointed it out to the man on the neighbouring site who was walking back across our site with his camera in hand. There was another one on the otherwise of Serenity on the tree. Getting my camera or of Serenity, we went to have a look.

Stuart went first, looking at the tree high up and down, desperate to spot it. Before he finally stood on it, I pointed out out to him. Apparently the guy had said it was on the tree, so Stuart having just seen one climbing up a tree well above head height, was looking way too high up to actually spot it. Well that’s his story anyway.

This one was huge. It’s a monitor lizard apparently and it was busy sunbathing.

A nice beach with a pleasant sunrise, a good walk and breakfast, along with some different wildlife had changed our impression of this campground overnight literally; it’s just best used out of season and reminded us of the need to check which campgrounds you actually need to book.

Birthday or not, it was also time to leave the campground.