The day after the day before.....

Sunday 26th May
Camp is over....but we are still here: two lots of our friends and us.  We will be staying here until Wednesday or thereabouts.  This morning I started by putting through all the clothes and bedding that had been soaked in the collapse of the annexe - three large loads.  While we were sorting things out and hanging out the washing etc, the the audio-visual men were dismantling the sound equipment and the ministers and Church workers were loading up the chairs and things for storage then taking down the meeting tent.  I noticed that they had started to take down the tent and asked Pete to take some photos - he is much faster moving than I am.  They were just taking down the first part when I saw them but by the time Peter got there they were well advanced, even in those few minutes.

Tent has been lowered to ground level using the pulleys attached to the rings around each pole

End sections are being pulled apart  - each section of the tent is approx 6 metres wide

Rolling up each of the end sections 

 Removing the spring clips that hold the tent around the pole

 Separating the main tent at the joins after it has been released from the pole

 Starting to flatten out the sections of the main body of the tent

 Moving along the line of poles

Almost there.....

At lunch time we finally found out which birds were using the hollow in a nearby gum tree as a nest - it is a pair of pink and grey galahs.  We had seen just a glimpse of tail disappearing into the hollow but hadn't seen what bird it belonged to until today.  Now they posed prettily for us and Peter managed to get this photo before they flew off.

After lunch we all set off and did a bit of sightseeing.  We went up the dirt road on Yarrahappini Mountain to Yarabinni Park and were going to go further but the road was closed off.  We gather that there must have been a wash-out with all the rain.  The road was quite rough and steep and it was good that we were in a 4WD.  we stopped for me to take a photo on a smoother part but it doesn't show how steep it is - in reality the road itself is even steeper than the slope at the side of the road.  It was fun doing some 4WDriving, through water and over the deeply eroded areas where the water from the rain over the last few days had gouged deep gashes into the dirt surface.

So we had to go back down and decided to go to Grassy Point, and look at the beach there, thinking that a walk on the beach would be just the thing.

This involved turning off the highway, going through a caravan park and then on to another off-road track at the end of that road.  We got to the beach and found it covered with a solid pile of wood - some that had been felled and a lot of rubbish timber - that had washed up on the sand.  It stretched the entire length of the beach, was about 6metres or 20 ft wide in front of where we were standing, and although it doesn't look it in these photos because we were looking down at it, it was 1-1.5 metres (3-4 feet) high or more.

A local told us that it wasn't there on Friday, but that it would have washed down the river at Kempsey and travelled all the way down with the tide.  He was going to fetch his mate who has a chain saw and they were going to stock up for winter.  I think there was enough wood there for hundreds of people to stock up for winter!

While we women were taking photos and looking for some pieces of weathered wood small enough for me to use as 'driftwood' for my beachside Petite Properties and Sea Shanty, the menfolk were trying to extricate Rick and Marilyn's car, which had become bogged in the sandy track.  Nothing they did would move it.  Finally the local bloke came back from walking his dog and he offered to pull the car out using a snatch strap.  He got it a certain way forward but it was still in soft sand and he couldn't go any further forward or he would have toppled over the drop onto the beach.  At this point another 4WD vehicle came up behind us and he was able to pull Rick's car out in reverse.  Whew!

So we drove off thankful that we were able to get Rick free.  Though at a pinch we could have towed him out with our car after a bit of manouvering to get it into a suitable position, the risk was that trying to do so would have bogged us too because of where we were parked.
Blessings
Sandie