Morning Drive

I couldn't help myself.

Australia is heading into autumn (they don't call it "fall" here) and the mornings can be crisply beautiful, with afternoons heading into the low 80s...feels like a Pacific Northwest Indian Summer. (I've had to explain what that means to a few people. Indians here are natives from India...otherwise there are Aborigines. But I digress.)

One morning was so clear and cold that I headed for the nearby State Forest shortly after Steve left for work at 7:30 a.m.

In the early morning, buttery, slanting sunlight I saw wallabys bounding across roads and into bushy areas, kookaburras flitting from gum tree to gum tree and quiet water in ponds surrounded by reeds and filled with algae.

I took deep breaths of the eucalyptus-scented woods and smiled.

Here are a few photos from that morning.

Dead snags in pond.

Discarded tire in foreground, ducks swimming in background on right.

Enhanced photo of red dirt road. The sunlight here can be harsh even in the morning, and the photo was washed out. I enhanced the color a bit to make it truer to what I saw, but it's still not accurate.

This just cracked me up. Aross Australia, these kinds of signs are common, including "chook poo" which means chicken "whatever."


Perfectly mirrored pond with algae in foreground. But in reality the trees were really green.

Come to Australia! I'll show you my favorite spots.