Cowra

Here are some more photos taken at the Japanese Gardens at Cowra, New South Wales, I hope you enjoy.

SURF CARNIVAL

With Australia being the fun loving place we want it to be and the fact that most Aussies and the tourists that visit here, love the beach we have many surf lifesavers patrolling our beaches to keep the swimmers safe. Our surf lifesavers work for free, they dont get paid like they do over in other countries, they do it out of love for the beach and to keep beach goers safe.

They often have surf carnivals where they raise money for equipment and also we have the Australian Iron Man competition where participants have to do a marathon of different water/beach activities and compete against each other for the Iron Man trophy. When we were at Coolum Beach the other weekend they had an Iron Man carnival being held there. There was even a helicopter in the air over the water with cameras to get all the action as it was happening. If you wanted more info about these Iron Man activities just google it.

SNAIL

While we were over at the Sunshine Coast last weekend we found this huge snail, looks pretty old but he was very much still alive (thats my hand by the way, so you can see how big he was).

PLANTS

Just some of the plants we have in our centre garden in the driveway

ONCE A YEAR

As you come down my driveway you can just drive straight around a small garden and back out again, so the garden is virtually in the middle of a roundabout lol. In this garden I have many succulent type plants and amongst those I have a plant that only flowers once per year and the flower blooms at night and by the next morning it is dead, so once a year (around Christmas time) I watch out for the flower. It is quite large, as big as my hand. I dont know the name but here is a photo.

RAIN

Yesterday we had a deluge of rain, it came down that hard and fast that my driveway was like a flowing stream.

Then it stopped, in 5 minutes it was all over. Later on last night it started to steady rain again and continued throughout the night. Oh boy didn't the frogs love it, they (hundreds), croaked all night long. This morning at 5.30am I got up to check to see if the dam wall was still there, yep it was and so is some nice catchment of water. Checked the rain guge and all up we got 50mm rain (2 inches) my water tanks are full again YAY !!

Moon

Ever since I was a little girl (which is a long time ago now LOL) I have been fascinated by the stars. We have a telescope, nothing expensive (under $100) and used my canon A560 which is only a 7.1 megapixel digital camera through the eye viewer and took this photo of the moon, it was very difficult getting it just right as the eye viewer is not made for taking photos through LOL but nevertheless we got this great shot so thought I would share it with you.

Water is precious

I had a comment on my photo from yesterday about water. We dont rely on our Dam for drinking water, that is purely for recreation, water plants etc. However as we are so far from town we have to provide our own water so we have a few water tanks attached to the house and sheds to catch the rain from their roof (when we get it LOL) This one holds 5,200 gallons, it is partly dug into the ground. We also have the tanks set so we can pump from one tank to another if one gets too low. We are water wise so dont waste water, it's a precious commodity but if we were to run out completely there are companies we can buy water from, they bring out a water truck and pump 3,000 gallons into your tank, we have been on this property for over 9 years now and only had to buy water when we originally moved here and put the tanks in. Even though we dont get much rain, every drop we do get on our roof areas go into the tanks and although they have been low over the years we havent run out yet. The last rain deluge we had that broke the dam wall filled all tanks so there was a positive after all.