Back in the blogosphere: Day 1 Tilba 25.4.10

Hello friends and family! We're back on the mainland, and back in blog-land. Since our last post, we've been to Berry for a family weekend with the Humes, big crowd of us, and big shared meals, everyone outdoing the previous meal-makers. Waddled around on the tennis court and beach to work up an appetite but still gained kilos! Then off to Queensland for a week to see our 5 month granddaughter again, and she's getting more adorable every day. The cutest, sunniest, liveliest little copper topped babe you ever met. Oh, and it was nice to see Lindsey and Rob, too. They are the bonus extra feature to the main event...

Back for Easter but too tired for Canberra's famous folk festival. It will have to wait another year. Missed a couple of concerts by son Wim, but will be seeing him play tomorrow.

Lots of appointments, getting ourselves prepped for the Big Trip, starting towards end May. Lots of organising and purchasing too, including a bigger tent, a stand-up tent. Hooray! And an item the need for which became very clear to me in Tasmania while crawling backwards out that little tent in the middle of the night, fumbling for thongs and head-torch and lurching sleepily in the dark in the general direction of the ablutions block....Yes, we have bought a bed-pan. Went to the medical supplies shop and bought one just like you see in the hospital. Its the Best Thing Ever for camping.

A bit of last-minute Canberra culture: movies (Mic Macs, The Last Station), a concert, a play (Lear), a visit to the Art Gallery, a few dinners out and dinners in with friends and the kids, a day with our other granddaughter Keliyah, then we were off again, this time for a week's camping at Tilba Lake. In this wonderful week we were the guests of our friends Chris and Robyn, with whom we travelled quite a bit in Tasmania.

Tilba Lake Community is a cooperative of far-sighted people who decided, about 25 years ago to buy a former dairy farm and rehabilitate the area to native vegetation. The property has three beaches, a headland and the lake mouth within its boundaries, and is now partially covered by native forest including a rainforest gully, all lovingly planted. The planted areas are beginning to self-seed and look completely natural, as if it has always been like that. Planting continues, creating a carbon sequestration forest that is growing every year. Near the top gate entrance there is now a solar powered community house, with fully equipped kitchen, bathrooms and bedrooms, but we didn't stay there, we stayed half a kilometre away, right down on the water's edge in our tent. Chris had emailed us before we arrived claiming this to be "the best campsite in Australia". Well, it may be. Or, perhaps there are others? I do have the fondest memories of camping by Lake Termeil in the 70's, but perhaps that area is not so pristine now. We resolved to make it our mission to test Chris' claim over the next 6 months or so.

We arrived in the afternoon, with the late sun making the hilly green pasture country around Tilba seem impossibly verdant. The area is rich and has been intensively farmed for a long time. There are black-faced sheep and pretty Jersey cows in the neat green adjacent paddocks, but once through the big "TLC" gates, a sense of wildness surrounds you. From the house there are long vistas to the water, with swathes of forest here and there. Chris and Robyn met us and walked while we drove through the forest pathways and kangaroo grass patches down to the water's edge, where they were already set up. It felt weird to be driving over untracked grassland, but they assured us there were no boulders or big holes to drive into.

The new tent is like the Taj Mahal compared with the one we took to Tasmania. You can stand up in the bedroom, and it has a second room "the vestibule" where you put your things, including, in pride of place in the corner, my bedpan. Ah what a beautiful thing is a nearby bedpan in the middle of the night. We also set up our other new toy, the solar panel, to charge up....the camp fridge! Modern camping, it's not like the old days.