Travelling Around

During Christmas I had the opportunity to travel far and wide, into the Australian Capital Territory and parts of New South Wales, then back into Victoria.

The scary part is that we visited quite a lot of places a few weeks before they had their bushfires and after I arrived back home, it was eerie to retrace my journey and discover that we had almost set a path through the areas that got burnt.

We started off by going to my Niece's place in Jerribomberra for a flying visit as she had just announced the good news that they were going to be proud parents this year. This was certainly worthy of a celebration, so we decided to fit this trip into the Holiday agenda and continue on from there.

Then, we spent a few days in Wodonga (I got to visit Daryl Geoghean just out of Wodonga at his new place and took some photos). I had a bit of trouble finding him at first, as he had moved residence and was slowly establishing new garden beds and arranging housing for his plants.

Daryl grows mainly amaryllids and has a nice collection of plants, some of which were in flower but many just being bedded in until he could establish homes for them.

He has neatly arranged garden beds and is experimenting with a few ideas and seems to be doing quite well with what he grows. I will have some photos developed soon, I hope.

From here we traveled down to Beechworth and then to Bright, then on to Wondilligong. All these places were threatened by fire.

I also got to visit Gary Reid, a most remarkable man with a most remarkable bulb collection - with miles of pots of just about every South African bulb you can imagine (and a lot of others thrown in).

We talked for many hours standing amongst the pots just discussing bulbs, plants, problems and how they grow - their colors and forms and many other things.

Gary has a black snake that lives amongst the pots and he had to make sure it was out of the way before we moved through the thick layers of grass and pots. Whilst I was visiting Gary, my wife Leone went walking and not far from his place,, she nearly trod on a brown snake! She wasn't amused when she also heard of the black snake in the vicinity.

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