Wipeout +7, back on the wheels ... and Spring has Sprung

A week after Dave wiped out on the road and it was blood, busted shoes and bent bits on the bike, he's back on two wheels and out for a looong ride in the McLaren Vale area with the local group of Cyloholocs. He must have inherited some gene for indestructibility ... he's found a way to bounce. Maybe he has a trick of turning off 90% of gravity in the split second after the back wheel drifts away and before the kneecaps impact the asphalt ... hmph. He could at least have the common decency to be creaky for a few weeks! But noooo...

Dave's Garmin Tracker app, running in real-time. Yup. He's back on the bike

...there's livin' proof of this particular pudd'n: the Garmin tracker app, running in realtime on my phone. Phablet. Whatchamacallit. (Difficult to call it a 'phone,' because virtually the only thing it never does is make a telephone phone call. Ahhh. Anybody remember what a telephone was...?)

Meanwhile, Spring has sprung with a vengeance:

Yup. Spring is here ... kerchoo! Pear blossom and silver rain -- front garden yesterday.

Truth is, it's been spring for about three weeks now, which also means we can expect summer to come in early and fast. In the last couple of years we've seen our first hot weather in October and the first very hot weather in November -- hundred degrees in "the old money." Sigh. Means we can expect to see the really hot weather in December, and the catastrophically hot weather in January and February. Now ... will the autumn/fall come in early too? With summer starting early, we'll be very, very ready for autumn by February!

Spring! Enjoy it while it lasts --

Waterfall Creek on the Coastal Trail, at Hallett Cove

It was so lovely yesterday we couldn't stay inside while we had the chance to get out. Leaving Mike to hold down the fort (since he has bronchitis, Mom has bronchitis, and they're having coughing contests; Mom is winning, hands down), we went over to Hallett Cove and hiked the boardwalk from the Hallett Cove Conservation Park to Marino. It really was beautiful.

Above is Waterfall Creek at the bottom of its gully ... yellow soursobs in the foreground tell you exactly what time of year this is; and if you notice the stairs/guardrail at top-right of this shot, you'll see how you climb down into the gully and back out again. There's no disabled access, but if you still have your feet under you, it's great. (If you'd like to see more of Hallett Cove -- and the Conservation Park -- I posted a photo essay to Meander to the Max ... find it here.) It's also a photographer's paradise: ocean, clifftop views, windy skies, the works. Don't forget the cameras.

Right now I have my fingers crossed. I tried Chinese massage for the head-neck-shoulders on Thursday ... looking for a way to get out from under the headache that's been bugging me every single day since December 4. For a while the GP has been saying he thinks the pain is very likely coming from the neck, and ... last week I actually heard/felt something go twang!!! in the neck a few seconds before migraine broadsided me. So ... remedial massage? Got a local one? Any chance of getting acupressure massage? Turns out yes. There's a place at Colonnades which, in traditional Chinese fashion doesn't advertise. They live and thrive on word of mouth. Right.

Well, it's coming up to 48 hours since I had the neck/head/shoulder massage, and so far I've had either no pain at all, or only the most slender tendrils which don't develop into full-blown headaches. Have no idea how long the effects will last, but if they were to wear off over a couple of weeks ... it's actually rather a pleasant way to spend 30 minutes. I can do that again. Fingers crossed.

Russian and Chinese visitors discover Meader to the Max! This is so cool...

It's a kind of magic, actually ... and it's the first time it's happened to date on my travel blog. I have over 60 posts up, and usually get about 10-15 hits a day, and count myself lucky to get that much because it's a very "general" blog dealing with road trips around parts of South Australia and Victoria. Then this happened, on July 20th-21st (cue Freddie Mercury and Queen) ...

Wowser. 65 page views yesterday -- which is amazing in itself; but see where they come from! That's Russia and China, with a few more in France, Germany, England, Canada, and a bunch extra in the US and Australia. 65 page loads in a day!

Does happy dance around the room (which is harder than it seems ... there ain't much space).

Don't know what happened, wouldn't have a clue how to make it happen again, but it is sooo nice. Worth a blog post, with Queen in the background...

Inspiration, Tennyson and memories of Alaska

Inspiration is an odd thing: fluid and viscous, and utterly unpredictable. Killing time, I was leafing through an old edition of Palgrave's (the version of about 1920, alas nothing vaguely like the version available today), and happened on a fragment of verse:

...bright and fierce and fickle is the South,

And dark and true and tender is the North.

It's Tennyson, and it's ... odd, to say the least. Dark and true and tender is the North. A frisson travels the length of your spine; the hair begins to stand up on the back of your neck. You see visions (at least, I do!) ...

Of course, I'm probably biased ... when I think 'north,' I usually think of Alaska, which is where I met the other half of my family, met and married my husband. And oddly enough, 'bright and fierce and fickle' is a pretty darned good description of Australia, especially in our summer months. Naturally, me being me, when I get story visions, it usually means science fiction or fantasy, or a combination of both. Hmm.

The story-generating gears are creaking right now. Something will come of this, I'm sure! I even found myself looking at images on the Internet, trying to find something embodying what I'm halfway seeing.

If there were a "photo of the day," this would be it:

Alaska winter fantasy ... not one of my images, guys. It's a wallpaper, from one of those desktop themes sites
where you slog through 87 ads to get to the content. Don't recall the URL, sorry. If anyone knows it,
let me know and I'll add it in right here.

There's a story out there, tickling on the periphery of my mind, itching like a mosquito bite on the very edge of my imagination. It'll come to me.

Which is all very well, but at the same time, each day I try to use this computer (a Dell Inspiron laptop, by the name of Pandora ... gotta give it a name on the home network, and when I got it Avatar was red-hot news), I realize how much it needs some work done to it. Nothing I can do locally; it's a workshop job, for sure. Dang.

So here I am with my mind happily meandering through Alaskan memories -- a good enough excuse to paste in a photo of myself! It's an eons-old shot, scanned in recently and uploaded to the travel blog I've been tinkering with for the last few years.

Most of the posts on the Meander to the Max blog feature road trips around South Australia and just a little bit interstate, but one series of posts is entitled Alaska Memories. The snapshot at left (which Dave took just off the side of the road on the Parks Highway, in ... golly, I think it had to be 1999), is from Four Seasons in One Post.

Good memories -- rich memories, too. People have asked more than once why I don't write something set in Alaska; and the most honest answer is, the Alaska I knew is now almost 20 years old. Things change a lot in two decades. If I were to write something set in Alaska, it would have to be set in an almost historical context --

Which sounds incredibly weird. I recently took part in a discussion regarding how fiction might be categorized. Just where does one draw a line, on one side of which is 'contemporary,' and on the other side is 'historical.' Turns out, many (most?) people these days are calling 1960s fiction historical. Whoo. I was eight or ten years old at the time. Ouch.