A historic location and a magical place...

Last weekend we headed to Glengallan for the seasonal markets (and some Geocaching) because it was Father's Day and we wanted to get out of Warwick.

We checked out the markets and the grounds. The building has been worked on since I last visited over 15 years ago, which lovely to see.

The sky was being very impressive and the weather pleasant. The market stalls were full of locally made things from soap to wooden toys, knitwear to artwork.

These two. Always these two. Jimmy tired of looking at stalls pretty quickly, but was really good and only started running around towards the end of our time walking and looking.

Jimmy makes me think of Christopher Robin - a little boy enjoying his own little world, boldly heading out into the wild. Jimmy was pretty attached to that stick that day AND determined not to have his photo taken.

We stopped for coffees at the Glengallan cafe. It's completely run by volunteers and the coffees were good. So was Jimmy's strawberry milkshake. Refueled, we set off to start Geocaching.

The sky was still amazing while we were out getting our first Geocache. And while we were logging the cache, a man drove up, asked about what we were doing - this is country Queensland - and after we told him, he told us about a spot that might be suitable: the site of a new Landcare project that he is involved with. So, we thought we'd check it out once we'd done all our Geocaching. Keep reading to see the photos.

Early spring!

Apparently it's not quite spring yet, but don't tell the plants that because I'm loving the flowers, blossoms, new leaves, greening grass, and the combination of warm and cool air. Also, bye-bye winter funk.

Speaking of the air, as soon as the night time temperatures stopped dropping below zero, there were all these smells in the air - it came as a bit of a shock after nearly 3 months of cold and woodfire smoke. I can't describe it, because it's not quite earthy and it's not yeasty but it's green leafy and wet old leaves decomposing and sweet all at the same time. It's mostly pleasant, but it's not a familiar smell to this Australia, even after two years in Manhattan, KS.

The light is changing, we're back on daylight savings, we're waking up to birds chirping away in the trees outside our bedroom window, the turkey vultures are back, and we only have a few more months in the apartment and Manhattan (we're only 100% sure about the apartment, but it looks like we're coming home in June/July). In light of our situation (coming home!), we're going to make the most of this spring because it really is quite different from spring in Australia.

Beautiful blossoms aside, I am looking forward to being in a home among the gum trees.

And now for something completely different: tree fungus!

As I mentioned, on Saturday we saw some fungi on some local red cedars. We'd never noticed it before.

We looked at them, Michael actually pulled one off and squished it and broke it open. It was hard on the inside.

Then we took a closer look at the trees and noticed blackish, porous-looking balls...

Where these fungus looking things part of the plants' reproductive cycle, triggered by the rain, or were they a parasitic fungus?