At last we escape from the city. It is amazing how deeply we have become to prefer the country to the city. Just sitting round a camp fire in the bush washes away all the stresses of the city and brings a sense of peace hard to achieve in the hurly-burly.
The Woods were away when we arrived but Ken and Wendy Conley were here and we had a pleasant evening catching up on what has been happening while we were in Brisbane.
The property is amazing. One hundred and twenty hectares (three hundred acres) of open woodland and river flats. It is not quite in its virgin condition as Robin has taken out most of the acacias to encourage the growth of grass for grazing.
There's no power and the water is rain water collected from the roof of the only building on the property, a shed. This is presently being developed into a big shed by extending the roof and by lowering the ground level at one end. When it is finished it will provide cover for the conversion of Robin's new 12 metre (40 ft) bus into a motorhome.
Keryn has a pet lizard. It is only 300 mm (12 in) long at the moment but as it is a monitor it will probably grow to 1.5 metres (5 ft) in due course. A similar animal of this size has been seen in the bush.
I found it hard to identify as it looks for all the world like the pictures of the Kimberley Rock Monitor which is said to be found only in the Kimberley. I think it must be a Sand Monitor as this is the only species even vaguely like this said to be found in this area. One of the common names for the Sand Monitor is Racehorse Goanna, because of its prodigious speed across the ground, so this little one is now called Pharlap.
I spent some time with both Robin and Keryn on problems they have with their computers. I managed to fix all of Keryn's but Robin still can't get Direct Cable Connection to work both ways which is a bit of a pain because he can't use Keryn's computer to read CDROMs. His problems with internet connection via his Qualcomm CDMA phone are presumably due to Telstra not having the service fully working yet.