A walk to Cawongla Store for lunch Part 2

We lunched for a couple of hours and then Erica needed to go and pick Maya up from school and I headed home. I strolled back down Cawongla Road, looking into the big blue of the sky and the deep green of the bunya pines.

This is a fabulous old Queenslander which I believe was the residence of the family who owned most of Cawongla at one stage. It's a lovely, very dignified home, though a little too close to the road for my liking.

Magnificent jacarandas are starting to change the colour of their foliage to a golden yellow colour before much of their canopy will drop away before being covered in the most beautiful of mauve in mid-to-late October.

An old dairy I think it is - a remnant of the time when dairying was still carried out in the valley. Not any more of course, very few dairies still remain. Beef cattle have replaced the dairy cattle. I wondered what kinds of snakes hide out in this old structure - perhaps carpet pythons and brown tree snakes up under the roof; perhaps brown snakes in the grassy paddock in which this structure is slowly decaying.

While we can't see Wollumbin from our place, it is visible a few minutes from our place along Cawongla Road. It has become an important part of the landscape for me.

The stretch of road before I enter Martin's Road and then into our road, McGuinness. Wattles have been flowering for a month or so and as I walk past these I remember childhood bushwalks in places such as Cardiff, the Warrumbungles and Blackbutt Reserve. I am fortunate I don't suffer from pollen allergies - to me the smell of wattle signals spring and the coming warmth and renewal that spring brings with it.

As I cross the bridge over Hanging Rock or Leycester Creek, which forms one of our boundaries I appreciate how it changes - how very moody it is. We haven't had much rain now for the past six weeks so the water is clear. After heavy rains the creek looks like it has chocolate flowing through it. I continue my walk up to the house and I am grateful that I have health and the ability to walk for as long as I want. I've had a great day.