Ganeida's Knots

Take the back roads instead of the highways. ~ Minnie Pearl. Liddy arrived home unexpectedly for the weekend ~ which was lovely but then necessitated a return trip. On Sunday. In the afternoon. Along unfamiliar highways.

My mother suggested we download directions from the RACQ site ~ which we did, & much good they did us. Naturally by the time we reached the most difficult part of the trip it was pitch dark & poorly signposted & both Ditz & I missed the turn off. The Alpaca Farm is tucked away behind one of the smaller townships at the bottom of the Great Dividing Range. This is Big Sky country two hours inland from the coast. They get frost here. It looks dry but it is just frost bitten. Ditz & I really enjoyed the huge cloud formations rolling away in every direction. I saw a letter winged kite & that alone would have made the trip worthwhile.
Liddy has been raving about the view she wakes to every morning: Mt Barney & Mt Lindsay towering like glowering sentinels in the distance. Ditz was going into raptures about the smell. Every Australian knows the smell I mean, the rich bush smell that reminds one sharply of lantana but isn't.

Just down the road from the farm is the little Uniting church sitting in a bare paddock with gravestones basking about it in the wintry afternoon sun, a barbed wire fence & lots of gum trees. No parking lot. No fancy steeple. It probably has a congregation of about two, if you omit the pastor & the organist.

Sile was delighted to get Liddy back & with true bush hospitality went of to make cuppas while Liddy showed us over the farm. Sile had left a couple of buckets of feed for the girls so Liddy could coax the alpacas up close for Ditz & I.

I must say they weren't shy though the boys were a bit put out to find the food wasn't coming their way! The black lad here is actually a llama & both Ditz & I went for the lad with the fringe.

One or two of the ladies are pregnant & we got a demonstration of spitting from an upset girl. Choice.

Then it was off to be shown round Liddy's one room shanty which is lovely & cosy & which she must keep neat as a pin because tourists will poke their noses against her windows! Sile had spoilt her. All her washing had been done & was neatly folded on the end of her bed! Honestly!

We had a lovely afternoon tea in the picnic area with home made biscuits & an offer to put us up for the night any time we feel the need to come out & catch up with our Liddy. There is nothing quite like country hospitality & I was hugely grateful for a caffeine hit before tackling the highways.

The run is fairly straightforward & the roads were almost deserted for most of the way ~ except for bikers who deemed us incredibly slow & insisted on passing us despite the double yellow lines! I hate people doing that. Freaks me out.

It was dark by the time we hit the highway into Brisbane & we missed our turn off. Everyone agrees it's difficult unless you know as unlike most of the signposting along the highways there is no warning that the exit is coming up. I had visions of landing in the middle of Brisbane, not an expectation to make my heart sing with delight, so when I saw the exit for Compton Road I took it. Ditz remarked cheerfully that it looked familiar. So it should! She landed us there on Sunday too! Despite our little detour we made the 7.10 boat, in time to prevent a total meltdown from the cats & Dearest freaking that something untoward had happened to us.
And Liddy, when I went to go to bed I couldn't find either cat. Guess where they were. Anything look familiar?