A Walk to Cawongla Store for lunch Part 1

 One of the things I love doing is walking. Our weekly rituals when we lived in Newcastle involved walking down to Beaumont Street on a Saturday morning to get the papers and thick slices of off-the-bone ham for lunch from the wonderful Italian ladies at Pina's Deli and then on Sunday afternoons we'd walk along Throsby Creek and down to Honeysuckle. It's not so easy to go for similar walks here but today I decided that I'd walk up to Cawongla Store where I was going to meet my friend and colleague, Erica, and her son Solly, for lunch. It was a very spring-like day here today and I set off just before 11.30, saying hello to the lady from Martin's Road who was beginning her own walk with her two dogs. As I climbed up out of Martin's Road and on to Cawongla Road I noticed this grass tree (see pic above) that I'd never noticed before. This is what walking is about, isn't it. Making discoveries; noticing things that you just don't, or can't see, when you are driving.

 I have a fascination with country roads and the play of light and shade on the macadam surface - a surface that in another few weeks will heat up and entice brown snakes and bearded dragons to soak up this warmth - sometimes for the very last time. I walked slowly, I had plenty of time and enjoyed the sensation of slight breeze against my skin; the sounds of the forest birds - whip, kookaburra, eastern rosella and magpie.

This small dam was being used by a couple of wood ducks while a pair of plovers made it very clear from their loud vocalising that I was intruding and unwelcome. I wondered what sorts of frogs used this pond during spring and whether there were any red bellied black snakes left in the area of whether they have disappeared from the valley altogether due to the impact of cane toads.

 Walking means that you are much more involved and integrated in the landscape than when you are cocooned in the steel and glass of a car. I smelled this unfortunate red necked wallaby a few metres before I saw it. I puzzled over the last third of its tail having been cut off and wandered why someone might have done this. I estimate that about one wallaby a week is killed on the stretch of road from our place down to Leycester which is the beginning of Rock Valley, so around 55 a year just on a 15km stretch of road. It may well be much higher of course, as I'm sure I don't see all that are killed.

 After walking for about 45 minutes I came to the lovely sign proclaiming this place as Cawongla, 'the peaceful place'. The bird on the left of the sign is a pheasant coucal or swamp pheasant, actually a type of cuckoo. They are very common around our place and we often see them flying slowly and somewhat clumsily like an ancient archeopteryx or hear their woo woo woo calls.

And this is Cawongla Store, a lovely place, which we visit from time to time on a Friday night for their wood fired pizzas. Erica, who is on sabbatical for the rest of this year, lives with her partner, Noah and their kids Maya and Solomon, in a rammed-earth house they built themselves at Barker's Vale, about 15 minutes north west of our place. They live on top of a mountain adjacent to Border Ranges National Park and when we visit them I always come back and think our place is down right suburban.

We had a wonderful lunch, enhanced by a couple of glasses of a lovely crisp sauvignon blanc semillon blend. Erica had fish and chips while I had a vege burger. We laughed, we gossiped, we caught up. As friends do.