Travel Snap Tuesday - Pine Valley

A is not one for lying on the beach and relaxing so for our honeymoon we went and walked the Overland Track in Tasmania. It was one of the most challenging things I have ever done as we walked about 90kms over 7 days. It was also one of the most beautiful places I've been lucky enough to visit.

Pine Valley was our second to last stop and this is some of the rainforest we passed through on the way to the hut. We spent the night at the hut with some other walkers, including Laura the amazing German backpacker, who had walked just about everywhere you could imagine in Australia and NZ  managed not to stay in a 'backpackers' for the whole 18 months she'd been away. Anyway, I'm getting off track!

While we were sleeping, the sky dumped us some snow (it was the 22nd of December!) so our walk the Acropolis the next day was white!

Travel snap Tuesday comes to you from Little Miss Moi and is about sharing a moment in time through a photo. If you want to join in, just post a pic of anywhere you’ve been in Australia or abroad then pop over to her blog and leave a link so we can find your travel snap!

Chair dilemma

So, a while back I posted about the $5 chairs I picked up at Tiny's Green Shed (read - the tip). I was full of excitement at the thought of recovering them and getting myself some awesome and cheap new dining chairs. then we went fabric shopping and our choices were prohibitively expensive - $71 a metre and $158 a metre!!!! - and I would need 8 metres!

Then I found Spoonflower. The prices seem reasonable - about $34ish a metre for the upholstery weight fabric if my maths is correct. Shipping is $12 but will take up to 3-4 weeks. Has anyone used this? Should I get a couple of swatches first or just dive straight in and order the whole 8 metres?

Here are my favourites. Sorry about the dodgy screenshots, you can check them out in all their glory if you follow the link below each one!

Mirror Mirror

Chevron Stripe

Linen Dahlia

Black Dahlia

Here is one of the chairs and this is what the new fabrics might look like. Yes, I'm a bit of a nerd and I'm on holidays!

  If you look past my questionable photoshopping skills which fabric do you like the best? I'm stuck!

Travel Snap Tuesday

Ok, so I've decided to get in on this Travel Snap Tuesday idea, seen here on Snippets Of My Life but originating with Little Miss Moi. Here goes!

I'm going to start in Australia. Western Australia to be exact. Nearly two years ago we flew into Perth to start a 4000km loop up the coast to the Ningaloo Reef and back. It is one of my favourite holidays not least because it is when A proposed!

First stop - the Pinnacles in Nambung National Park. An amazing area with thousands of limestone spiers sticking up out of the sand. We spent the afternoon here watching the scenery change as the sun set and the rain clouds rolled in. It was just beautiful.

We kept driving north, searching for a bit more warmth finally arriving at Shark Bay - most famous for the dolphins at Monkey Mia. We did go there and I did get to feed a dolphin but a bigger highlight was the Francois Peron National Park. Putting aside the rules about taking our hire vehicle 'off road' we set off through about 20kms of sandy roads and stunning scenery to Cape Peron and the lookout at the very tip of the peninsula. While we were looking out along the coast I thought I saw something in the shallows and said to A, "I think that's a dolphin down there." "Nah, I think it's a bird" he replied. We decided it was worth investigating. After a bit of scrambling down a track we got to the beach and made our way along the edge of the water as quietly as we could. Sure enough, as we got closer we saw a dolphin and her calf frolicking in the shallows. It was amazing, we stood mesmerized and watched for ages.

We finally made it to the main destination - Coral Bay - where we met an old high school friend who was now living in a mining town not too far away to visit for the weekend. Coral Bay and equally, Exmouth, had the most wonderful sea life and we spent all of our time snorkelling. The corals are not bright and colourful, but the fish most certainly are! This little guy was one of my favourites. This is the area famous for whale shark tours. Unfortunately we were there just after the season had finished so instead we went on a Manta Ray tour. Incredible. Such grace and beauty. We were also rewarded with a swim with a turtle, numerous sightings of sting rays, a couple of small (!) sharks and an amazing display of octopus camouflage and a sighting of a pod of whales passing as we watched the sun set over the water. Wow!

The last stop I thought I could take or leave but A was really keen on heading 400km inland to Mt Augustus which claims to be the worlds largest monocline (slightly different to a monolith, like Uluru). It's big, twice as big as Uluru but with some vegetation and a gentler gradient on one side of the rock. It was a beautiful sunny day and the climb was stunning. It took about 2 - 3 hours if I remember correctly, probably quicker if you don't lose the little painted dots that guide the way at the end! As I sat recovering at the top, A came over with two glasses of champagne, one containing a beautiful, sparkly diamond. He'd snuck the glasses, champagne and diamond all the way from Perth on our first day without letting on a thing! He'd even snuck out of the tent in the early morning to ring and ask my parents permission and chill the champagne in a bucket of cold water. What a sweetie.  

Anyway, that just about wraps up the highlights of the trip. Pop back next week for India or maybe Borneo!

Holidays!

Yep, I'm on them again as of 30 minutes ago. And, to make it even better, A also has the whole two weeks off. These are the happy fireworks going off in my head right now!

Tomorrow there will be a massage and facial care of my new SIL, it was our wedding present. Over the two weeks there will also be some football, comedy, friends, camping, family and house and yard improvements.

Yipeeee!

Winter already?

Dear Mother Nature

I'm not altogether loving this whole winter in April thing you've got going. I've broken the Canberra rule and turned my heater on before ANZAC day. Both myself and my little veggie garden would appreciate another week or two of sunshiny warmth please.

Thank you,

Christie

Anniversaries

Today we've been married for 5 months! Tomorrow we've been 'together' for 10 years! Who would have thought that a relationship that kicked off after watching Chopper would have lasted this long (with things looking good for a lot longer)?

To celebrate, here's a selection of the last of the wedding photos. After the ceremony we had some more photos in the park outside the church and the alley way behind the reception centre. It's hard to remember things about the night already but I do know that the food was delish (what I could fit in wearing the dress, which was very little), the company was fantastic, the speeches were lovely and we (more or less) nailed our hurriedly put-together-the-morning-before dance.

Nailing the dance!

Not nailing the evening three step - done in honour of my grandparents
but getting a good laugh out of it.

Yay for good memories!

I finished a classic! And I even sort of enjoyed it!

This is a little celebration post. Nothing too exciting really, I've got a stupid cold so I'm celebrating the little things. I just finished reading Jane Austen's Emma! I'm not one for classics I'm afraid. We had to read Lady Chatterley's Lover for book club once - hours of my life I'll never get back*. But I made it to the end of this one! Admittedly I did fall asleep 7 or 8 times while reading the first half of the book but really got into the second half and didn't want to stop reading!

So, yay for me, I feel like a really good book clubber (I felt bad last month because I didn't even bother to get the book to try and read) and am very pleased with myself!

Now I'm on to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go so I can refresh my memory before I see the movie. Much more excited about reading that one again.

Since I'm sticking to the positives I'm loving Sparkadia's new album The Great Impression at the moment. We went and saw them play last week. So cool. I'm thinking I'll put the album on my work computer and listen while I work tomorrow to see if it helps my cold brain fuzziness!

If you've not heard of them here's a song for you!



Hope all is well!

*The only reason I got through it was because I was taking the bus to work at the time and I wasn't getting those hours back anyway.

What we've been doing

Is turning the front of our yard into a disaster zone. It's OK though. Usually things have to look worse before they look better, right?

Before

So what's the plan? We are turning that bare patch which doesn't grow grass no matter what into an extra parking space that goes along the front - see the black weed matting? That will be covered with crushed brick pebbles that were free (so long as we did the shoveling and carting of them out of one of As colleagues driveway). Yay. 

During

Between the black matting and the retaining wall (that you can't see in this picture) we're going to plant a row of Leucadendrons that will grow to a metre high and create a bit of a privacy screen so we can put in a little courtyard/deck just in front of the windows you can see on the left. On the road side of the screening plants we'll put in the Strelitzias (that A's mum gave us from her garden, that are still sitting in pots over a year later - opps) and maybe some Kangaroo Paw because I am in love with Kangaroo Paw at the moment!

Leucadendron - Devils Blush via Garden Express

Kangaroo Paw via dicktay200 on Flickr

Strelitzias by Gurney5 on Flickr

Apart from loving the colours of these plants, the leucadendrons are frost and drought tolerant, a must in Canberra. Strelitzias must be tough as despite serious neglect in their pots for the last year and a bit, they just keep on coming back and any plants that we grow, despite the best of our intentions, need to be survivors!  Kangaroo Paw can be difficult I'm told, but I plan on hunting down the gardeners at work for advice as we have the most amazing Kangaroo Paws in the gardens there.

In other news, chair progress is slow. I've pulled two apart and worked out how to fix up the sagginess but trying to choose a fabric is a nightmare! Will post some thoughts on that later.

Hope all is well!