Fleurieu 2011: Sunset, Moonrise, the Sealink -- and a lot more

Carrickalinga is a comparatively tiny community that's growing rapidly, since developers arrived.
It sits on one of the most beautiful bays on the Fleurieu Peninsula, on the Gulf St. Vincent.
The area was a haven for wild birds, but human impact -- well...

Save the hooded plover ... three years ago, only 75 birds
were left on the Fleurieu. at time of this writing in 2014,
I believe it's a lot less. Which is sad.

Leaving Carrickalinga, you hang a right and head south into a very different landscape...

Cliffs typify the coastline from Rapid Bay to Cape Jervis, and --

The skyline is punctuated by wind farms, with windmills turning slowly in the endless wind off the Southern Ocean.

Cape Jervis at last! The terminal for the Sealink ferry between mainland South Australia and Kangaroo Island.

All aboard! Drive on and park, next stop, Penneshaw on the northeast coast of the island.

The Sealink is the only way to get vehicles to Kangaroo Island -- hence the traffic -- but you can also fly.
Rex Airlines offers the 30-minute flight. Now, that would be fun!

Adjacent to the Sealink ferry terminal is the Cape Jervis small boat harbor, from which fishing charters embark.

The hike to the top of the bluff offers a fantastic view. The dark ridge line down on the horizon isn't cloud...
in fact, that is Kangaroo Island; it's actually that close --

And speaking of fishing charters --! This one is headed home as afternoon winds down toward evening.

Leaving Cape Jervis, we were headed for Normanville, where we were staying overnight. The country is very lovely.
Shots like this are taken through the windscreen, at about 60mph ... the smudges in the sky are on the
windscreen, and I decided not to paint them out, because they're actually part of the trip!

Afternoon is heading rapidly into evening: sunset light on the hills at Rapid Bay.

Evening light colors and mists the cliffs stretching south, back toward Cape Jervis...

Look at that light! Couldn't resist stopping at this parking lot for photos. The view of the cliffs, above, is
just about right behind you, as you look at these Norfolk Island Pine trees. 

Normanville at last: dinner on our minds, while we wait for sunset...

Normanville Jetty by evening light. Notice the clouds on the horizon! Is the weather changing?!

Normanville beach, looking south towards those cliffs...

Sunset over the Gulf St. Vincent ... stand by with the cameras!

Sunset photography is one of life's pleasures, but it can also be dramatic --

Like looking into the heart of a furnace. This is photographed at something like a 500mm zoom; you can
get closer, but the "structure" of the picture is perfect right here.

Right behind you as the sun sets, the full moon is rising. Tonight was the moon's closest point to Earth
in many years, so it looked huge -- this isn't a special effect, no Photoshop involved here.

Moonrise over Normanville, just as it happened ... no special effects. Lovely!

Right on sunset, anglers were setting fishing lines on the beach, and one or two were actually launching
boats, a sure sign that some kind of fish is "running" in the twilight. This boat is headed home --
eight or nine pictures above, you saw it still in the water, waiting to be trailered.

Last of the sunset, over Normanville jetty...

Next morning: little corellas begin to wake in the early morning light. Loudly.

We took a walk after breakfast and before checking out. Normanville has some huge specimens of the
Moreton Bay Fig -- Ficus macrophylla.  Says Wikipedia, it's "a large evergreen banyan tree of the Moraceae family that is a native of most of the eastern coast of Australia, from the Atherton Tableland (17° S) in the north to the Illawarra (34° S) in New South Wales, and Lord Howe Island. Its common name is derived from Moreton Bay in Queensland, Australia."  There -- now you know. 

River Parananacooka ... say this three times, fast, after a couple of gin and tonics. Urp.

Leonard's Mill, at the Deep Creek exit -- restaurant, cafe, hotel. Must do this sometime...

Notice the sky over Leonard's Mill? Lots of enhancement makes the image bright and colorful,
but yes, we're losing the weather rapidly.

Smuggler's cove! Rapid Bay, and look at those caves at the waterline! In the distance, that's Normanville
you're seeing; we left there about an hour ago.

The feature for which Rapid Bay is best known is its enormous jetty, which is a destination for scuba divers.
Lots of marine life around here: as the ancient jetty rots away, it's creating a great habitat for critters.

Did I say Smuggler's Cove? There's the cave to smuggle from! Now, smuggle what...? "Laces for a lady,
letters for a spy." Thank you, Mr. Kipling.

From Second Valley you could see the extent to which the weather really was changing -- but it offered
an opportunity to capture some superb seascapes.

Leaving Rapid Bay and heading back inland, past a refurbished colonial era barn ... the stonework is
about 150 years old, the roof is brand new. Gotta like this.

Delamere is a region, not a town. It's on the map, but when you get there it's a fork in the road with a
little store selling everything from gasoline to ice cream...

About a mile west is the Second Valley Forest Reserve. Pocket-size sustainable timber industry...

And here's what the conditions were really like! This is noon. No enhancement on this one.
Now, where did we put those umbrellas and rain ponchos --? In fact, we were lucky:
we managed to skip around the skirts of the rain, never actually got wet.

Just so you know where you are: outside Delamere and 48ks from Victor Harbour ...
Beef cattle on the range. In this part of the world, all beef and dairy are "grass fed..." 

The dairy herd in the paddock, against the backdrop of a timber plantation. Must be near Delamere, right? 

With the weather changing visibly, we meandered back and forth across the Fleurieu Peninsula, touching down on places we hadn't seen in years, and just one or two we'd never seen at all. We were booked into accommodations in Normanville ... and we probably won't do this again, because it was way too noisy. At the height of the vacation season (weather notwithstanding!) it seemed every man and his uncle were on holiday, and staying in the same place as ourselves. It either finally quietened down by 2:00am, or else Jade was so tired by that point, she went to sleep despite the ruckus. However, there's quieter places than Normanville, by far, and one of the best things about the Fleurieu Peninsula is that nowhere is far from anywhere, so your range of choice is close to limitless.

The changeable weather did offer an opportunity to get some marvelous pictures -- the kind of images you don't get in brilliant, blue-sky weather. It's also great to go so far south, the landscape changes utterly.

Next on this trip: Goolwa, Hindmarsh Island and Victor Harbor. 

Alaska Memories -- Post Two ... been running the scanner again!

With blue skies -- and more forecast for a couple of days -- head for the hills! More specifically,
head for Denali Park, and hope to see the mountain itself; it isn't always visible...

Denali at the end of the Road! Talk about luck ...
somewhere on the Parks Highway, Alaska.

Being an Aussie, Jade  could scarcely believe the colors of the forest ... and we're still in the
parking lot of Denali Park ... fall of 1999.

...just so you know where you are! Even in summer, Alaska is prone to cool, wet weather, so
when the sun shines and the sky is clear you make the most of every moment. Like this next occasion... 

At Angel Rocks, not far from Fairbanks, Alaska ... Jade and best pal Anna;
Dave taking the picture, back in July, 1998. (Jade's the not-tall one.)

Summer driving poses its own perils. There's no ice on the road ... but
moose, caribou, even bears are quite likely to appear right before you...

...as you head to places like Chena Lakes, not far from Fairbanks, on a day so perfect, there was not
even a ripple on the water while fall colors turned every hillside to gold.

Make the most of every hour you can get when the Fairbanks hills look this way, because -- 

-- very soon Chena Lakes wll be like this: solid ice. (Actually, this was spring, just before breakup. Cold!)

The Monument to the Pioneers in Golden Heart Plaza, Fairbanks, is
frozen and snowbound...

Snow was a carpet right across Golden Heart Plaza, whereas in summertime...

The fountain streams, the flowerbeds are alive with color, and that
clock tower plays selections of well-known music on its chimes!

Summer in the Fairbanks hills ... warm, humid, buzzing with just the occasional mosquito...

...and here's almost the same place at first snow -- so pretty! And, uh, no mosquitoes. But that first snow
signals the beginning of a long, long, dark winter...

Ah, this must be the place they put the snow in storage through summer,
till it's time to bring it out for next winter. Knew it had to be somewhere.

The bridge on the Chena River -- March, when snow machines and dog sleds use the river as a highway...

...and the World Ice Art Championships are staged in the big open space
of the north side of Airport Way, which bisects the town...

A mouse and a frog playing chess -- carved in ice, in 1999 ... a daylight shot. I would hike over and watch
the sculptors, and shoot on film, saving my transparency stock for the nighttime photos...

...swans carved in ice. And, as beautiful as the daytime shots are, the carvings are illuminated at night, and are
breathtaking. I captured them as transparencies ... and who knows where my slides are now?

But Alaska is not only about ice and snow. In summer the landscape blooms
with flowers like fireweed: when the petals are open all the way to the
top of the stem -- summer is over. Not much time left here! And --

Wild lupine, photographed on the tundra high on the Richardson Highway.
We'd actually stopped to photograph a herd of caribou in the distance.

Home in Fairbanks, lilac thrives in the garden ... ker-choo! ...

...while the Chena River is open, and summer demands you go out and explore. Like --

Yes, Virginia, there really is a place called Iceworm Gulch, and here's Jade standing right by the sign, to prove it!
Where? Milepoint 204.4, on the Parks Highway. And there's more --

The Santa Claus House -- actually a year-round Christmas store in North Pole, Alaska, south of Fairbanks.

The Knotty Shop, over on the Richardson Highway, near Salcha, where burled wood was turned into the
most amazing artwork. They sold art, and also lengths of the wood itself, for railings and so on...

Burled wood becomes a giant mosquito. That's Dave in the background,
and we're thinking about ice cream. The Knotty Shop had amazing ice cream.

The burled wood itself has beautiful textures. It's caused by a beetle that infests the tree -- not to be confused,
apparently, with the spruce beetle which just kills the whole tree, and is a plague in Alaska.

Summertime can be dusty. Looking down on Anchorage from Powerline Pass in the Chugach National Forest.

Anchorage, seen from Flat Top, in Chugach National Forest, just before we head north, back to Farbanks...

...the meander of the Salcha River near, uh, Salcha, on the Richardson Highway, not far from North Pole, AK.

On an Alaskan road trip, you're likely to see quite a lot of the pipeline. Alaska is as much about oil production as
it's ever been about hunting and fishing...

The Mapco Refinery in 1998 ... manufacturing aviation fuel, which was tankered by rail to Anchorage.
At the time of this writing, it's closing down: it's cheaper to bring fuel in by barge from the "lower 48."

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System ... Prudhoe to Valdez, via twelve
pumping stations: think in "pipeline miles" here.

The Ayeska Pipeline is bigger than it looks. Imagine the mass and the
velocity of crude moving right above your head...! And --

Please don't climb on the pipeline. We wouldn't dream of it.

A blast from the past: the pipeline has 12 pumping stations ... Pump Station 13 was a project that didn't
work out: a cafe-cum-gift store. And it's not even there any longer.

Running the scanner is a lot of fun, on afternoons too hot to do anything much other than sit in front of the a/c and try to keep cool. Memories galore are popping out of the box of photos I found a few weeks ago, while looking for something else entirely -- but I'm coming to realize that there's a lot more still unaccounted for. And, what I wouldn't give to find my boxes of slides! In the spirit of "the one that got away," part of me wants to say that all my best pictures were on slides. That can't be true, but ...!

These images span several years, different trips, different cars, before marriage and after. Scanning and enhancing the pictures here reminds me of just how much fun it was. It's far too easy to begin to forget.

Back with more, the next time I've had an afternoon with the scanner.