snakes, ticks & pademelons

This past weekend we had a clear schedule (ie I wasn't painting), so on a spur of the moment decision we went camping - down to lovely Binna Burra, about 1.5 hours south of Brisbane and inland from the gold coast.

So we got there, set up the tent and sorted ourselves.

There were a group of scouts camping nearby and they were shouting about a snake so we duly had to go and check it out - it was some hugemungus python! Fairly safely asleep(?) in a patch of sun at the base of a tree. Across the road from the campground but big enough to reinforce YD's parania about snakes....

After checking him out we wandered off on our 1st bushwalk which went to a lookout thru dry bush & rainforest. It was a fairly easy walk even for the kids. #1Son was quite facinated with all the beautiful mosses growing on the fallen logs -he had to keep touching it and couldn't understand why he shouldn't...

There were some amazing huge trees with interesting knot thingys and finally the lookout was lovely ( but didn't have any barriers to stop little uns falling over the cliff so we couldn't sit and relax!). The boys thought the walk back was a little scarey as the sun was going down but we actually got back in time to wander up to the lodge to see the sun actually set so it wasn't that dark!

It was after our walk when I had just finished cooking dinner that I discovered a dreaded tick on my neck!!! eeeewww! YD gallantly pulled it off but I seemed to be allergic to it and my neck swelled somewhat and was quite sore for the next few days. Still is a bit....

Our next day involved a few other short walks and part walks - very hard with *boy's short legs... but it really tired the boys out. Unfortunately I decided we would eat at the (very exy) restaurant buffet that night which was a bad decision in many ways but the most being that the buffet wasn't a quick serve yourself one and the 6.30pm start time meant we were lcky to get ourselves out by 8.30 by which time the boys were almost asleep at the table....and had only eaten 6 slices of bread and a sausage between them (for the cost of $20). The staff were very nice and tried to get things going for us as quick as possible tho.

Then we had the walk back to the campsite.....in pitch dark night time. I had thought to take a torch but its little glow wasn't very wide in such darkness. We did point out how wonderful the stars were but *Boy especially was more than a little scared. All the was over tho when we found about 15 Pademelons (kinda like little roos) in our torchlight just as we got close to the camp.

Our pack up day was a hot one and we stopped in at Dreamworld again (so have pretty much now almost got our monies worth from the passes) and after re doing favourite rides & seeing the tigers we had lunch then went thru to white water world which the boys loved. It was so nice to be amongst the water and altho we had to separate to follow each boys daring levels it was very nice. I would hate to try it mid school hols tho - hard enough watching the boys in the crowd that was there!



My photos were taken with my NEW CAMERA - a panasonic lumix FZ35 -which was my birthday pressie. I haven't yet read the manual but its a beautiful camera!
I did have a problem with the computer crashing and wiping the card tho halfway thru downloading the pics. I would like to again thank Fe for her help and recommend the free recovery program I found called PicaJet which got most of my pics back.