A fear of fire
Many of our regular readers have asked us how we are getting on with the bush fires all around us? It would be entirely wrong to say we weren't a little worried when just over a 100 kilometres away a fire is blazing that covers thousand of hectares. You may well be saying,
"Well why is that worrying you?" The answer is that for the last two days the town of Bright has been covered in a smoke haze from the fires at Gippsland. Our fears were not alleviated when a friend of Pam and Mike's glibly told us that if any fire came from the south Bright didn't stand a chance. Ever since I worked for the London Fire Brigade 40 years ago I have been scared of fire in all forms and think it possibly a worse way of dying than drowning. Cheerful topic for a blog eh?
There are fire advice lorries in the town square, signs up everywhere saying there is a total fire ban and the gardener told us he wouldn't mow the lawn in case a spark started a fire. Cap all this with all news bulletins covering bush fires in and around the state and suddenly fire is at the top of everyone's agenda.
We are all meant to have a fire survival plan which as far as I can see is that we get in a car and drive away, remembering that fires can travel extremely quickly and that according to the television ad we saw we might not be able to out run one. So far so good and the whole situation was helped by a rain/hail storm today. How can you have relatively large chunks of hail when the temperature has been 30°C and over? The hailstones were about 5 mill across and lasted for four or five minutes before really heavy rain. Unfortunately the whole storm only lasted for thirty minutes or so and the rain was hardly enough to help the situation. However we all sat on the verandah and watched the rainfall as though it was a strange phenomenon.Rosemarie even took several photographs of the storm as part of the expedition record.
We had really good lunch at the stag farm and enjoyed seeing some spectacular stags. The scenery here is very reminiscent of southern Germany or the low alps in Austria. It is a very beautiful part of the country and one that is easy to love. So we spent the afternoon watching the tennis or the cricket and had an early night.