Bluebird over the Mountain

Returned to the scene of last week's late start - the Bunyaville parkrun. As I explained previously it's much more like a short fell race than the other Australian parkruns that I've competed in, it's all off road and hilly and, although this photo doesn't seem to illustrate it very well, I'm coming full pelt down a long slope towards the end of the race. In third place but I'm looking annoyed because I'd hung on in second for much of the race but got blown away by a young lad who, fair play, seemed to have judged the pace perfectly.

Have now found a race at a place called Numinbah Valley that looks more like my cup of tea in September - off road, 11 miles with around 2500 foot of climbing, I suspect that there's nothing too technical about it but we shall see! It's a there and back over the Wunburra range and has two good climbs in it. Anyway until then it's parkruns and the Bridge to Brisbane run (abbreviated to the B2B which everyone seems to know all about including non runners.)

This is an example of a Queensland Bottle Tree - it has a bulky trunk intended to store water in drought conditions - it also looks a bit like something I seem to remember from Dr Who in the 1960's - if I hang around too long in this position and Vicky turns her back for a couple of seconds, I'll suddenly get absorbed by the tree leaving nothing behind apart from a size 13 New Balance running shoe. Australia has a wonderful resource called the National Register of Significant Trees and I found that there is one of these Bottle Trees in Toowoomba that is over 3 metres in diameter. Unfortunately we left Toowoomba last week and won't be there again this trip! We did find a London Plane Tree in Spring Bluff with a height of over 40 metres - these are the trees commonly found on London streets that have flaky bark that peels off in sheets about the size of your hand - very resistant to pollution in London which explains their widespread planting but the cockneys  who brought them to Australia found that they were also very tolerant of heat and drought!

Bird of the day is the Blue Faced Honeyeater - spotted a pair of them this afternoon on a fence just round the corner in suburban Brisbane. They were sitting in the sun and the blue bit on their faces was startlingly iridescent. Since we've been here I've logged nearly 50 Australian species of bird and until now I didn't think I was a twitcher.