Spring-time Pictures in the Hills
Every second day I have to go to Silver Chain clinic to have a 'wound' dressing changed. As it was a Sunday and I did not have to rush back for work, I decided to come back via the 'back road' scenic drive through Karragullen and the hills to the north of Kalamunda.
This morning was a beautiful sunny spring day. The type of fresh warm spring day where, if you stopped the car somewhere, you would probably fall asleep. Even normally mundane things looked fresh and full of life—like they had a glow around them.
The first thing I noticed was this clump of bright orange flowers on side of the road—which I zoomed past at about 75 kph (about 45 mph for our American friends). About 10 seconds after passing them I decided to go back and take a picture. I generally always have my camera in the car; even if I *RARELY* do ever stop and use it.
So I found a safe spot to make a U-turn and went back.
Photographs rarely do justice to what the human eye sees. You have to imagine driving along this road with its green grassy sides—comprised mainly of weeds—and then, suddenly, there is this glowing patch of bright orange flowers that pops up out of nowhere.
Inspired by this I decided to take a few other pictures of things along the road on the way home, even thought at this point I was probably already about half-way home—just to show off a little bit of spring around Kalamunda. Even a few relatively boring trees near the Pickering Brook general store (and associated shops) looked picturesque. Well, I thought so at the time anyway; and I purposely left the grey bitumen road surface in the foreground of the crop as a contrast.
I can't post too many pictures into my blogs because pictures take up valuable storage space and I am only allocated a limited amount of storage. Even though I am skilled at reducing the size of images while retaining colour saturation and detail, the bottom line is that pictures take up gobs more room than just text.
The following picture is of what I like to refer to as 'apple blossoms'—even though I kind of know that they are not apple blossoms. I think they might actually be nectarine blossoms. But to me, because I don't really know, I just use the verbal shorthand of 'apple blossoms' to cover it all.
Last picture. Getting close to home now. This is the Rose Heritage restaurant and coffee shop. You can tell this by the over-sized red rose at the end of the carpark.
It is a bit faded now but this large red rose used to really stand out when it was first erected. I guess it is a bit hard to re-paint as I suspect that pole it is on is concreted reasonably deep into the ground. So they would need a cherry-picker to get up there and paint it.
You can't tell from this photograph but the cafe area you can see with the green tin roof looks down into a small valley, which is a rose nursery. Having a cup of coffee here in mid-summer can be a visual treat with roses of all shape, sizes, and colours arragned in rows in bloom in the shallow valley below.
Barry.