Hot and Cold

Gosh it's hot!

Here's grim determination coming up towards the finish line of the Airlie Beach parkrun. Vicky's seventh parkrun here and her third best - not bad considering it was such a hot morning. She's done 141 parkruns in total so should reach 150 by the end of the year. I also suffered in the heat but sneaked into the top ten finishers. Airlie Beach is a tropical parkrun, it's about 500K north of the Tropic of Capricorn which bisects the Australian coast just south of the small town of Yeppoon. So we'll have to have a go at the Yeppoon parkrun sometime in the next year or so - watch this space!

Oooh it's chilly!

And here's the same young lady seven days later. After several weeks of warm weather in Queensland we headed south to Canberra for a couple of days and then hit the high road to Jindabyne which is close to the highest parkrun in Australia, not only is it 950 metres above sea level it's a lot colder than Airlie Beach - there was over 20 degrees difference!

So just where are the Spanish ones?

And a third shot of the same delightful lady in a more relaxed frame of mind meandering through a grove of birch trees at the Canberra Arboretum. This arboretum is like no other that we've seen, usually arboreta are areas of parkland with individual specimens trees dotted around - some of them are quite splendid. Canberra is different - they decided a few years ago to plant mini forests of trees of the same species, some of them threatened or vanishing species. OK you might say - these look just like ordinary birches in this photo, but these birches are sheltering a rare variety, the Spanish Birch, these are disappearing in their native home - once the Spanish Birches become established here the regular birches will be sacrificed - it's what you might term a far sighted long term project. Very impressive and a joy to look at!