Road Trip

Four hours drive south and inland is a different world.

'Tis cold already down there. Well, cool to northern coastal dwellers still sleeping with bedroom fans and dressing in singlet tops and cotton skirts and flip floppy footwear.

The plants are no longer the fat leaved, fleshy flowered varieties grown from wet and humidity... They are finer, more delicate and cold hardy. Very English.

Even the trees...

The drive, while long, is quite beautiful.

The scenery changes quite a bit and there is an awful lot I missed that I wanted to show you. But the Road Authority, hasn't really designed roads with safe stopping zones, and what I have managed to avoid in these photo's, is showing the incredible volume of other road trippers also hurtling down these roads at 100 kms an hour on their way everywhere, this Easter long weekend.

It makes for very nervous passengers, when the driver pulls the car over to the shoulder of the road, rips out the camera from the back seat, stands at the side of the road while two semi-trailer's and a couple of four wheel drives roar past, runs out to the middle of the road, turns her back to oncoming traffic and snaps off a couple of photo's before the next rally of cars arrives...

Sometimes, you just want to swing off the highway, onto the side road... Just to see where it goes...

A storm sprang up between the highway and the ocean. It was looking quite ominous for a bit...  Particularly as this area is becoming somewhat similar to Tornado Alley in the USA.  

We do get them apparently, though they have never really made much more of an appearance than the occasional water spout, until this past summer. Now they are occurring regularly and are chewing swathes through residential areas, and chasing cars down freeways, with frantic drivers trying to record for You Tube and Keep Out Of Its Way at the same time...

But there was just a bit of rain today as the storm actual slid by to my left and no tornado eventuated -which was kinda lucky, because I didn't really feel like doing a Helen Hunt, and driving down a freeway dodging oil tanker debris... Plus, I realised I needed to get new windscreen wipers for my car. I wasn't able to decide if visibility was better, or worse, with them on.