day-tripping and sacred life sunday

today, we went for a lovely drive up to mount tamborine. as with our trip to forest lake last week, we woke up to rain in the morning and debated whether or not to go at all. i'm glad we did because the rain moved on and we were blessed with a beautiful, clear winter's day.....albeit a little chilly up on the mountain. we also had a few dubious moments which i'll mention below.

as we started out on our journey, the ECM light lit up on the dashboard of beau's car...from what we understand, this usually means to get your engine checked...however, beau only recently paid out for a full service so he switched off and switched back on and all was well again so we continued on our merry way.

click on any image to enlarge
the picture below was taken from the car on the way up the mountain....the dense rainforest is to the left in the pic. you can feel the cooler temperature change too.

below is a view from the top of the mountain

then we stopped to watch some paragliders taking off, however, when beau went to lock the car, he had trouble getting his car remote to work. the problem was that the immobiliser had armed itself and we needed the remote to disarm it. it couldn't have been the remote battery because a new battery was fitted only recently so, after some tapping and knocking the darned remote for what seemed like forever, it finally decided to start working..PHEW!

there were a couple of wind-socks which helped the paragliders determine wind conditions

we waited around for 20 minutes or so but the wind conditions weren't quite right for the paragliders to take flight so they started packing things up. time for us to move on too.

on the other side of the mountain, we found another lovely view pictured below. way in the distance, you can see our gold coast.

when we stopped to take the pic above, four inquisitive young llamas alpacas on the property beside where we stood came over to the fence....they were soooooooooo darned CUTE!!!

our winter started on june 1st but i also spotted some rich autumn colours which is quite rare in our sub-tropical climate then it was back to the car to explore a little more but...

....more troubles!! firstly, aaron's seat belt jammed when he tried to put it on and it took quite some time for me to work it free. after that was done, beau tried to start the car but it didn't want to cooperate, it wasn't the battery as you could hear the rotations quite strongly...for some reason, it just didn't want to fire up. after several attempts, it finally started much to my relief BUT....when beau went to move off, the tyres started spinning out....no traction due to the ground being waterlogged from all the rain over the past couple of weeks. we had been deceived by the dense grass. so, being on a hill, beau had to reverse the car backwards down the hill and onto the road.

at that point, we decided to pay heed to the signs and head straight home instead of exploring any further. even that didn't go well because, despite the amount of times we have gone to mount tamborine, we missed our turn off on the way home which added another 15 minutes onto our journey. beau and i are both baffled that we could possibly have missed seeing the huge service/gas station situated on the corner of the road we were supposed to turn into.

what an unusual day it was.....beautiful for sure....but we wondered if there was a message of some sort for us in all the little problems we faced throughout the day.

SACRED LIFE SUNDAY

• i am grateful that the rain cleared early today so we could go on our mountain drive


• i am grateful to have spent such a nice day with three of my five children


• i am grateful for the beauty that nature bestowed upon us at mount tamborine


• i am grateful for the lovely hot chips/fries we ate at lunchtime.....YUM!


• i am grateful that we were able to conquer the few problems we faced on our trip


• i am grateful that we made it home safely


• i am grateful for the ugg boots that are keeping my tootsies cosy and warm as i type this


• i am grateful that we had leftover curry for dinner tonight so i didn't have to come home and cook a meal from scratch


• i am grateful to all my blogger friends who take the time to visit my blog and read my dribble....thank you ~ (((hugs)))

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i have two mantra cards at various stages of progress so, hopefully, i will have at least one of them finished to show you all tomorrow also.

for those who inquired after my last post, our low winter temperatures here in the logan area of brisbane are an average of 6°C/43°F....rarely below it. Our high winter temps average at around 22°C/72°F....so nothing to really complain about except for the fact that, in a sub-tropical climate like this one, most homes don't have central heating which means lots of quilts and blankets to stay warm in winter.

LOVE, LIGHT AND PEACE