Gowrie

The gorgeous land at Gowrie, now known as Birdwood Sanctuary Estate, is finished - settlements are happening and plans are in council for a couple of houses.

Gowrie

The Pine pot luck dinner that was due to be held at our house last weekend was cancelled due to rain! That's the third time we've cancelled a Pine pot luck at our house due to rain - and we're in the middle of a drought - maybe we should keep trying and break the drought! But it did leave us with a free Saturday - since we didn't have to spend the entire day trying to clean up enough for guests - so we went up to Toowoomba to check out how the Gowrie subdivision - now known as Birdwood Sanctuary Estate - was looking. It was wet up there - though not as much as at home - and Alec brought the motorbike for a bit of blacksoil fun.

It was cold and windy and we could see the rain coming across the valley - gorgeous. Louisa and Max hunted through the sanctuary hoping to spot a quail (the sanctuary is there to protect an endangered quail - the black breasted button nosed quail) and Lee & Roger put in a few posts to make it easier to see boundaries.

Then we climbed into the Ranger - Roger and Alec in the back - for a four wheel driving tour of the Baxters Road subdivision. Also going to be gorgeous.

Lee drove us past the new Ballymoss subdivision and we headed for home stopping of course to buy some cheap fruit and veg on the way.

Gowrie

Peet has been a little up tight lately - high school and hormones I think - so we thought he needed some good hard work and a bit of a circuit breaker. Lee & Roger had been up to the Gowrie land (a subdivision outside Toowoomba) to put up lot numbers and didn't get the job finished so Roger and Peet went up to finish the job and camp overnight.

It's a gorgeous piece of land - beautiful views and stars, wallabies, huge centipedes and so on. Lee even saw an echidna once. It is also home to the endangered Black Breasted Button Nosed Quail - hence the 25 ha of sanctuary we had to keep around the bottom.

The boys drove up on Friday afternoon - they couldn't leave till 1.30 pm because Peet wanted to eat lunch with his friends at school- had pork chops and canned spaghetti (it's a camping-with-Roger tradition - glad I never go camping with Roger alone) - and half froze since a cool change came through that afternoon. The land is high and on the top of a plateau and the wind whistled through and chilled their bones - and they loved all of it. They put up all the signs - collected a bunch of very nice rocks for my garden and shot some tin cans with subsonic bullets bought for the occassion.