birthday shmirthday

If you have been reading this blog for a while you'll know that I always run away at this time of the year. It's partly that it is mid-semester break (and after teaching first year students for three quarters of a school year a break is desperately needed), the downhill slide into Xmas is about to start and ....... it all coincides with my birthday. Being the freaky little Virgo that I am I just can't deal with the stress of birthdays (do they ever live up to expectations?..... sometimes, often with disastrous- and sometimes hilarious- results! all that attention...... eeeekkk!) so over the last few years I've instigated an escape plan. 

I get to have a break, I get to remain quiet for a day, I receive lots of lovely phonecalls, text messages, etc and I don't have to deal with other peoples expectations of how I should spend that day. Perfect really.

So on the 2nd of September (day before birthday) I pushed through from Hobart to Queenstown. A long winding drive through farm land that gave way to amazing World Heritage Areas. Stopped at Lake St Clair, drove across the bridge at the Franklin River, saw snowtopped Frenchman's Cap in the distance and wound through the denuded hills down into Queenstown. 

It was late in the afternoon when I got there and being in a valley it was already getting dark...... and very depressing. Queenstown is one of those places where you can feel the isolation of a hundred years pressing in on you and I felt surrounded by 'bad juju'. I couldn't stay and decided to make it to Strahan in the last of the light from a beautiful setting sun.

And Strahan was a good place to have a birthday. All dripping rain, big fat globules of pure Roaring Forties water, soaking and thunderstormy giving way to beautiful washed clean light.