Head in the Clouds – Feet in the Dirt – Page 115 – Traipsing through life in NW Tasmania

A Distinct Lack Of View

Every bit of me is tired tonight!
After I made Jeff walk the boring beach (haha – sure he enjoyed but no mountains to slog up) he really wanted to do a ‘real’ walk… so we went back to Roland to climb the other side.

We went up the track we avoided last time (you know, because it kinda went straight up)
Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt!!
I cannot seem to capture how steep this track was… and it went on and on.
And on.
And when we got to a cross path Jeff insisted that it was going to now level out.
We got this:

Yeah that’s the path and it is NOT level!

I think it was another hour of still going up but with the added bonus of rocks/boulders to haul my backside up and over.
Can I add it was really wet weather too?? And foggy.

So we were going to do all this and fail to get rewarded with a view!
Did I mention it was wet?

I couldn’t have been wetter if I had jumped in a river!

Eventually I fell into a mud puddle and got Hangry (It was past 2pm and we hadn’t stopped for lunch)
I used up my quota of creative swear words but I would have to say it was a mongrel of a climb. When we return to Roland, I know I won’t be taking that path up!! (On the up side, I am pretty sure my bottom is a LOT skinnier today!!)

Everything is spooky and cool in the mist though, so it was pretty – even with limited visibility.

The mountain that you can’t actually see that we were climbing was Mt Van Dyke. Its alongside Mt Roland.

We had a small water crossing…

We finally reached the crossroad part where we were last week, where we could sit and eat – and then blissfully go DOWN!

I could better appreciate how beautiful the mist made the scenery look!

Well… I am off to face-plant my bed.
If you don’t see me here tomorrow its because I didn’t bother moving for 24 hours! (that or I COULDN’T move for 24 hours)

Cheers!

Wood, Fire & Vegetables

Hello!
What are the weekend plans?
We dabbled in a few around the yard tasks – we put the bore on into the tanks as they were getting rather low with the lack of rain recently. Its nice to have that option instead of in the past having to resort to sponge baths!! 😀

I had a lovely time burning off some of our rubbish – the paper bin was reasonably full so that got sorted

Ruby’s old fence had been sitting there a while – no time to really make a start on building up the kindling with it

We didn’t get a lot done, but it was a nice start to a fairly time consuming job

Hopefully we will be able to sell a bit of this as well – people do pay for bundles of pre-cut kindling!

A few dahlias here and there are still making a bit of a show which is nice

I picked the rest of the apples – no point feeding them all to the possums the greedy beggars!

Still a bunch of tomatoes coming along, not to mention the zucchini’s which keep appearing at a steady rate!

Happily I also got out some bags and bits and pieces that I intend taking to Texas – or thinking of taking to Texas! So its a mild start!

Hope your weekends are fabulous!

West Coast Beach

I actually have a spectacular amount of work to somehow get through between now and leaving the country.
Why I am prancing about on another beach adding countless images to my backlog of photos to be post-processed I really don’t know.
Oh well… I never claimed to be bright!

We drove over to the west side of Tasmania today to take a walk down from West Point along the fairly rugged coastline.
It wasn’t even windy (much) but the waves were large and constantly pounding the sand. It was pretty fabulous.

I was in total awe of the kelp! It was MASSIVE!!

And there was a lot of it

I totally wanted to back the car up as close as I could and just fill the back with it!! However, I didn’t even broach that subject with Jeff. Car is still new to him and we aren’t even allowed to sweat on the seats (Yes -we have towels to sit on when we finish our walks. haha)

We were loving the rocky landscapes, the dunes and the stretches of sand.

Up in the dunes we found a number of midden sites – created by thousands of generations of Aboriginal people who lived there. Its amazing to still clearly see these areas.

We found a fabulous bunch of rocks that were practically rainbow coloured! It was hard to believe they were natural.

Well… thats a few of the many images I took today. It was a beautiful walk – and nice to go somewhere a bit different, even though I think Jeff was disappointed we didn’t walk up a mountain for 5 hours!!

Tomorrow I totally have to start working through my ‘To Do’ list for Texas! Really!!!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Cheers

A Bit of Natures Art

Hello!
The end of the week is almost on us again!
I enjoyed pulling some weeds out today (just in random places) as I went and fed some of the potted plants with my kelp juice. Also made another batch of pickled beetroot.

We ended the day with a brisk walk around Anniversary Bay – but we lingered on the beach so I could play about getting some rock & sand images. There were some cool patterns & colours out there today!

Not to be outdone by Mother Nature, Jeff adds his own art!!

The runoff from the hills was a very dense black colour!!

Time to put the camera away and get back on with the exercise!

Cheers!

Tidying the Hothouse

Sadly I had to take my sister back to the airport this morning. We had such a fabulous week of catching up and doing things. And I was very proud of the Tasmanian Weather for being extremely nice to us for the whole time!
Unfortunately Rosemary’s flights got quite delayed this morning due to fog in Melbourne so she was really late home today.

I wasn’t going to do anything… but then felt guilty so I went into the hothouse and started ripping out dead stuff and weeds and trying to make it look happy again

There were dead tomato plants and mostly dead cucumber plants. (and did I mention weeds??)

It took ages to untangle things!

Mad

I left a few strands of cucumber vines that looked like they were reshooting at the end. There are flowers so we might be lucky to get a few more cucumbers off them now that they can breathe and all the dead manky stuff is gone.
I think the capsicum will be happier too as they were being smothered

The later self seeded tomatoes are starting to produce fruit so it will be interesting how long into the autumn and winter we get tomatoes this year!

Yesterday Rosemary motivated me to tie up the tomatoes that were taking over the back veranda. She was probably tired of falling over them!
Still.. they are better off tied up. It was just a ‘gunna’ job that I hadn’t gotten to yet.

Both of these self seeded plants have been steadily producing fruit

And more to come

Impressive really, considering we are over halfway through autumn!

The chooks are still being slack! Between two and four eggs a day from eleven chickens is a poor effort!! I threaten them with being involved in casseroles, but they give me that disbelieving chook-look then ignore me.

Anyway, I am going to attempt an earlier night – Jeff was asking before he went to work about which mountain we were going to climb next!!
Cheers!

Seaweed, Beaches and Afternoon Tea

It seemed a bit of a waste for Rosemary to bring her gardening clothes all the way to Tasmania and only use them once… so off to the beach with the trailer we went to collect a heap of seaweed!
Lots on the beach right now.

Beautiful day again today!

After loading up the trailer, we went down to Fossil Bluff for some beach time and a bit of a fossick of course!

First we walked up to the top of the bluff… it didn’t seem right to not walk up some sort of incline on Rosemary’s last day!

It was the perfect day to be down by the water

Checking out the 30 million year old shells…

So many rocks – so little time…

The tide was still low enough to get up to the other side of the beach – although Rosemary got a bit caught on a rock shelf and had to take off her shoes to wade back over to the beach! Oopsie

Fabulous seaweed on the cliff

Naturally we had to squeeze in an afternoon cuppa with Ruby and Margie!

It was so lovely sitting in the sunny front room catching up on news and having a bite to eat!

Its been a fabulous week with my sister… I will be very sad to put her on a plane tomorrow!!

Hope everyone’s week has started well and I will leave you with some more of those hairy seaweed photos!

Cheers

A Slower Paced Day

Hello!
I must say, despite our frequent hiking of late, I still had bits of me pretty sore today after yesterdays mammoth walk up that mountain.
We took things fairly easy today – Jeff napped a lot.
Rosemary and I did a couple of overdue kitchen things.
The beetroot got cooked (pickled)

And a lot of tomatoes got cooked (with some onion, capsicum etc) for the freezer for future use. At least the crazy amount of tomatoes is back under control for now!

We then spent a very pleasant afternoon in front of the fire watching movies!!

Rosemary made up a beautiful side salad for dinner – Rocket, feta and the new beetroot! It was sooooo goooood! I am an instant fan!

Anyway – nice to have a slow day!
Time for bed, Rose’s last day tomorrow 🙁
Got to squeeze in a few more activities before we have to say goodbye!

Cheers

Mt Roland

Hello – another day, another mountain!
It was a fairly big day – a couple of hours drive to the start of our destination, then about six and a half hours hiking!
We got back in the (almost) dark so I didn’t get a photo of the amazing looming presence of Mt Roland from the bottom.

We did 17.71kms (to be precise) and an elevation of 820mt!!!
(Guess we will all sleep incredibly well tonight)

‘We’ consisted of Jeff, Rosemary, Fiona and myself.

It was a pretty walk up. (and up!)
(and up)

Ahhh – a stop for a bit of trail-mix. Good way to re-energise!

We finally came out onto open plains which was lovely. The sun even put in an appearance!

Still a little way to go to make it to the very top

A lucky find! Pepper berries! We stopped for a while and collected a whole heap! We knew we were going to run out of daylight so we couldn’t stay and pick for too long, but Rose and I got a good little stash each to now dry and use!

Happy Rosemary collecting pepper berries! (Luckily I don’t travel without multiple spare ziplocks. Never know when you will find nice shells/rocks/food)

Not far to go now!

The final climb was a rock scramble -up some impressive boulders!

Was in a t-shirt most of the day – started to cool off at that point!

Then it was some showing-off time

The views were just so fabulous! As always – worth the effort!

Getting back down the boulder-scramble was slightly nerve-wracking at times!

Always some great little things in nature to admire on these hikes

On our way down – the afternoon light on the mountain was lovely.

We got back to the car just on dark! Lesson learned. Next time start earlier or bring a torch!!

I have a heap more photos – but these are all I managed to post process to at least write a little story before face-planting my bed!
(I tell ya – I am nearly ready for the Grand Canyon with all this walking!)

Have a lovely day!!

Cheers

Beautiful Weather – Perfect for the Beach

There was a list of options of ‘What To Do’ for today… beautiful weather made the beach win out!
We picked up our cousin, Fiona and her dog, Alice and went down to Black River Beach, as it had been a while since we were there.