Quinninup Falls

One of the things my delightful partner and I love to do is bush walking, wherever we happen to be. And, we're more than happy to drag our friends along with us.  So a wee while ago, our very great friend G was staying with us and we decided we'd do a day trip and walk into Quinninup Falls.  I know, I was astonished to find that we have substantial waterfalls in Western Australia that are worth hiking too. Who'd have though such a thing would exist in a state that has an average annual rain fall of around 900 mils.  

The first thing to know about Quinninup Falls is that typing "Quinninup Falls" as your destination into Google maps will not get you there.  It will take you down some lovely side roads (happily right past Gabrielle's chocolate where we had to make a stop) and plenty of signs saying "this is not the way to Quinninup Falls" and "no access to beach or falls".  If you type in Moses Rock car park, on the other hand, you will get to the right place to start the walk into the falls. 

The trail is part of the Cape to Cape walk.  Anything you've heard about walking the Cape to Cape being hard slog is all true. It's about a two to two and half hour return journey into the falls.  Much of it is along a nicely marked track, with some walk way and quite a bit of low rock to negotiate. There had been a bunch of rain on the days before our walk so the path was very wet and we had to slog through mud without falling on our bums (there were several near misses) and try and get around the bigger puddles.  The most challenging bit though was the massive sand dune near the end of the walk in.  Great fun going down. Not so much fun on the way out, especially when you're carrying extra baggage (as in weight) like I am.  Much, much fitter people than me said they found it really hard going getting out so I'm kinda chuffed with myself that I did make it without either rolling back down or having to be rescued by a helicopter or something equally as embarrassing.   It is all worth it though.  The falls are truly beautiful and we spent a good deal of time just sitting there, getting slightly wet (lovely, because it was a hot day) and enjoying the sound of the falls. 

These two pics are of the beach from the car park.  Beautiful huh. You can tell these are R's photos right.   I love the way he has captured the mist from the waves crashing and the movement of the water in the first one and the clouds in the second. I think he used a filter or something.  Something technical that people who take proper photos know about.  

The falls were tricky to photograph well. The light wasn't great when we got there and it was difficult to find a spot to photograph them from.  But here are some of our efforts. 

This last shot will just give you a sense of how I was feeling after the long trek up the sand dune!!

At least now I can say I've walked the Cape to Cape!  Ha!! 

Beautiful Valley

Those of you who know me well know that I am beyond hopeless at keeping in touch via phone or email and refuse to use FB.  So, "I know it's out of fashion and a trifle uncool", but I've decided to attempt to keep in touch via this blog.  For those of you who aren't old enough to know, that is a line from one of my favourite songs called Echo Beach. Why bother going to the effort of coming up with a catchy line when Martha and the Muffins have already perfected one I say.  

To explain the title of this blog, gleann bòidheach is Scottish gaelic for beautiful valley.  It's the name we've chosen for our new home. A nod to my Scottish heritage and because we can sit on our front verandah and enjoy the ever changing views across the valley.  

We've been in our new home for just over a year and a half now (I know, I know....very slow getting this blog up and running).  So much has happened in that time that it is difficult to know what to write about.  Not helped by my increasingly unreliable memory  banks (everything Mum said about getting older is true darn it!!). So I'm just going to write about the roses in our garden because I've got some pics to share with you.

The garden here is so different from the one we had in our previous home of 30 years. That garden was all beautiful natives and low maintenance.  We spent most of our time just enjoying wandering around the lovely path ways and watching the quendas enjoy the space. The garden in our new home is an entirely different matter.  Here we have a mix of formal and informal and lots of pruning and mowing and weeding.  We could work in the garden full time and probably still have plenty to do every day.  Instead we're squeezing our gardening into weekends and holidays so, well, it could look a lot better. But it's not doing too badly when all is said and done. 

This year we've had the most amazing roses.  We pruned them quite late because the locals tell us we do get frost here.  We've not actually seen any frost.  But then, we're probably not up early enough.  Because we pruned late, or perhaps because of the very fickle weather we've been having this year (hail in November!!) the roses flowered quite late.  But the flowering was well and truly worth waiting for.

This first picture is of a standard rose which we can see from our kitchen window and the living area.  It is so loaded with roses this year it's hard to see the plant underneath.  The petals on the ground look almost (almost) like snow. 

This photo highlights how bad I am at photography more than the roses I think.  But you can see there is a whole row of roses down the side of the house and they're all full of blooms.  Such a pleasure.

This rose doesn't produce as many flowers as some of the others. But they're huge. So big in fact this year that the stems have all bent over. 

Enough of roses.  Did I mention at the beginning of the blog that we had hail? In November. I know, it's supposed to be hot (and today it is hot, still 22 degrees at midnight).  We had two hail storms. One produced hail that was as big as a decent sized marble. Thankfully the hail storm was brief and no damage was caused.  The thunder echoing through our beautiful valley and the lightning were an impressive (and slightly frightening) sight to behold.  I wouldn't have liked the storm to have been any closer though. 

The next pics are of the shade house, after the second hail storm.

We tried knocking the hail off the netting because we were worried that it would damage it.  But all that happened is that we got wet. And cold!! Lesson learned. 

And that's your lot for this post.  I will endeavour to come up with something more interesting than just roses for the next posting.  Until then, behave yourselves and stay safe.