A Drive on the Wild Side

Oh we had fun yesterday afternoon, in that squirmy 'I'm glad that's behind me' sort of a way! Michael and I took Ella off to see the local butterfly farm, and on the way back we checked in on Lot 31 North Boambee Road to see if it had finally been slashed, and it had! So we drove our new second-hand Kia four-wheel drive up there to have a look. So far, so good.






View from the bottom of the drive, looking up through the (empty) dam, up the gully to the house site which is behind the large camphor laurel tree on the right hand side, top.




The Kia managed the dirt track and the slope up to the house site beautifully; much better than our Subaru. Things began to go slightly wrong, however, as Michael negotiated a drive further up the hill, behind and to the left of the proposed house site. We got to a point where the wheels started to slip even in 4L gearing, so he backed it down the hill and round the corner... only instead of letting gravity take us back down to the flat area of the proposed house site, Michael wanted to reverse up to the flat area above the house site, only the Kia wasn't having any of it, which left us stranded across a narrow piece of track, unable to drive backwards or to either side! Instead, Ella and I got out (wimps!) and Michael drew on years of off-road driving experience on his parents' sheep and cattle stations, and managed to drive forwards and down a very steep incline to the shallower land beyond.

View of the trees just across and to the left of the proposed house site, including some of the tree ferns. Hopefully the Rural Fire Brigade would allow us to thin out the fringes of the wooded area to allow a 30 metre Asset Protection Zone rather than making us fell all the trees because they might be a fire hazard...

Phew! Only this now meant that he was on the other side of the creek bed from the track used to drive up to the house - but at least he wasn't on a vertiginous slope with nowhere much to go... So Ella and I followed him down the slope to near the bottom, when we all realised he was going to have to traverse the lower end of the gully and the side of the dam to get back up to the track! This proved quite tricky with a large boulder and a tree trunk in the way, not to mention the car teetering on the side of a 40 degree slope and almost deciding to topple over...

I think Michael was more worried about his pride should he have to go to the neighbouring house for assistance than anything else, while I was trying not to watch while holding Ella's hand and swearing very inventively under my breath! Luckily Michael couldn't hear Adam's children (in the house just below the property) saying, "Mummy, I think he's stuck!", "Oh no, he's OK", "No, he's stuck again!" at their windows.



This is the gully that runs down the property.






Michael managed to drive out of it, much to my relief because I wouldn't have been able to do so, and when we got to him he was killing himself laughing which meant that my warning to Ella not to make any jokes about the car to Daddy was a bit unecessary... But the final straw for me was discovering that my toes were bleeding because I had a fat Lot 31 leech attached to my foot. They inject an anti-coagulant when they bite, and the bloody toe (ha ha) didn't stop seeping for hours afterwards. Lovely.