Annies Crazy World

This bird is a Bush Stone Curlew, this is the first one that I had seen, although I had heard plenty as their Strangled Cries can be heard every morning and every evening.

This morning Sam and I went to Nelly Bay and this afternoon after Sam went to work I went down to the beach front at Horshoe Bay and spent the afternoon with some of Sam’s friends.

This evening we went to Bungalow Bay for Dinner and after dinner Sam made up ‘the Mumsie Cocktail’, I don’t know what he put in it but he knows my tastes well and based it on milk with a sprinkle of choclate on top, yummy.

Every day, at 4.30 pm, Bungalow Bay Youth Hostel feeds the Birds…They come in there hundreds, make a gaud awful noise, are not at all shy and poop on anyone that doesn’t get under cover quick enough.

Visited some fiends of Sam’s where some of them played guitar most of the evening…I really liked this zoomed in detail photo that Sam took.

This morning the English girls departed for their next destination and we did some washing and had a lazy morning. I walked Sam to work and then carried on to the beach front shops and had a cup of coffee before wandering home again…I liked that everything was withing walking distance and one of the locals had shown me the butterfly walk so instead of walking beside the road I could wander through a lovely grove of trees for part of the way…walking was also starting to give me the lie of the land, yesturday when we were at the top of the Forts we could see an oval, on the way home today I realized that I was walking past an oval and this photo looking back up to the Forts From the Street Sam lives in, is the only photo that I took today.

I decided to stitch some miniature thongs for the English backpackers and Sam’s flat mate K…Having decided that I would like to stitch the miniature thongs I went looking for something to stitch the thongs onto, I found in my buzy box a business card sized piece of tymtax (sp?? thick, stiff interfacing), I cut it into 3 pieces and stitched safty pins onto the back, I originally intended to do just the thongs but the white background looked boring so K painted the backgrounds while I cut the rubber from the side of a thong…

While the PVA Glue that I used to seal the colour was drying we went to the beach…I took needle and thread to the beach to do a running repair on the pocket of Sam’s work apron so that he could wear it to work this afternoon…

While at the beach we collected a few tiny shells and a pinch of sand to use on the Thong Brooches… and together with a few stitches of green thread to make the seaweed 3 dimensional they formed a perfect little background for the thongs…I photographed them on the thong that I cut the rubber from.

This afternoon while Sam and K where at work I went on a 2 hour walk, with the English girls, up the hill to the old Forts, the photo above is the view from one of the forts with the other fort on the left…the photo on the right is a detail of the corner of one of the forts…

It had been a long but very relaxed day and we finished it with a friendly game of pool.

As I said before my son loves fishing, has recently introduced his flat mate to fishing and we set of for the jetty at picnic bay to throw a line in.

One of the things that I loved about Magnetic Island was that there was a lot of backpackers who come from all points of the globe and are all interesting to talk to…when we arrived at the jetty we met a couple of English girls who were fishing for the first time, caught a flathead and had no idea what to do with it, they had asked a passer by and been told that if they didn’t know how they shouldn’t be fishing.

We thought that was rather unfriendly and Sam’s reaction was to pull out his fishing knife, take the fish from the net, remove the hook, hold it for them to photograph and fillet it for them.

We stayed there fishing with them for several hours…several fish were caught all of which, other than a squid, were either under sized or protected coral species that were returned to the water, the only thing that I caught was a peice of Coral…When it came time to go home they came back to our house where Sam cooked up the flathead and squid and they stayed the night.

We went snorkeling around the base of these rocks, I grew up in a beachside town but am not a strong swimmer because I could never learn to breath properly and have to hold my nose to put my head underwater and I must have thought that breathing through a snorkel would be just as hard and I had never tried it before…

I was thrilled at just how easy it was to breath through the snorkel and delighted with how much can be seen through the mask and how beautiful the coral is.

From the beach, the rock that my son is photographing, looked like a Dolphin, from where he was it looked like shelves.

Sam was called in to work this evening…I took the opportunity to catch up on some washing and other domestics and then went down to have tea with him.

While there I got a photo of a gecko and he introduced me to the resident frog.

This photo of my brothers house is the last photo that I took with my minalta camera…The shadow in the top left is a crack in the lens, it has been like that for months and I have been framing my shots so that I can crop of the shadow but it has ruined a few of my photos.

After taking this photo I caught the bus back to townsville where I met up with my son and we went shopping to purchase me a new mobile phone (to replace the one that I drowned when I fell in the water on the first day of my holiday) and a new camera, a Canon PowerShot A720 IS…

By the time we got back to Sam’s place it was dark and we were tired so I didn’t try the new camera out untill the next day.

Port Douglas is one of Australias most expensive tourist destinations what an irony that the mattress on the bunk I was sleeping on was the worst mattress that I have ever slept on, springs with no padding…It is a beautifull location but on the whole way to over the top trendy for my liking.

We headed back south along the coast road towards Cairns, which took us through some beautiful country and to Hartley’s Crocodile Park, which we really enjoyed.

A Good start to the visit was the Tawny Frogmouths at the entrance…Seeing them took me straight back to childhood when my brother Brian, found a baby one that had fallen out of its nest and brought it home…It was a tiny fluffy ball as a chick and we called him Tiny, he was a wonderful pet that lived with us for years, he ate out of the same bowl as the cat and I have a photo of it sitting on the cats back…

We started with a boat cruise around their lagoon where the tour guide told us the history of the park, pointed out where the crocodiles where around the edges and fed some with meat tied on the end of a pole.

It is amazing how far out of the water they can jump and I was thrilled to get a photo of one mid jump, his name was ‘High 5’ and as we were getting off the boat I noticed that my nephew had a ‘hi 5’ hat on (Hi 5 is a kids TV show) and I took his photo to remind me of the crocodlies name.

The second part of the tour took us to the saltwater and then the freshwater enclosures, this part of the tour was great because the tour guide was the crocodile farmer so he new his stuff and even better he loved the crocodiles and was passionate about respecting and looking after them.

Our next stop was Cairns where the kids had a swim and we looked at a few shops before heading back to my brothers for the night.

Lake Tinaroo Caravan Park was a great place to stay, lovely setting and a friendly atmospher and after packing up our camp we had a swim in the pool that had a waterfall at the back and pretty stones set into the bottom of the wadding pool.

After our swim J, V and B headed home while the rest of us headed further north, on our way down from the tablelands, just before one of the lookouts there was a road sign that said camera opportunity and thus we felt compeled to stop and use our cameras.

We arrived at Port Douglas late morning, with time to look around the outdoor craft market before having a picnic lunch in a park by the water.

After a long leisurly lunch we checked out some of the shops before going to find a caravan park and hireing a cabin for the night, after settling in and having a swim/rest we went back down to the main street to get a pizza for tea.

Steve and Michelle had planned to head off north for a few days and I was joining them, at the last minite Joe and Veronica decided to join us for the first day so in 2 cars we drove up into the Atherton tablelands…It was a lovely drive through rainforest with spectacular views…We stopped at Milan Falls for afternoon tea and a refreshing dip in the swimming hole at the bottom of the Falls…

We made camp at a caravan park on the shores of Lake Tinaroo….The Photo of Milan falls is the only good photo I have of the day and it took me a while to remember why I had taken no more photos in the evening, it was because I have very few memories of the evening as I was struck with the worst headache that I can ever remember having, it was making me feel ill, everyone looked after me finding panadol, bringing me glasses of water, massageing my neck and putting to bed in the back of the van where I fell into a deep sleep and woke the next morning feeling well and refreshed.