Bay beauty

OK here's the back story from today. As I said yesterday, today was to be the day that Paladian and I went to visit one of our favourite Open Gardens - the first one to open after the Christmas break. I predicted I would be blipping it.

So we set off early to beat the crowds - only to find that the garden called Frosty Flats was NOT open. They had changed the times to a late afternoon/evening opening, something never done before. No way we could wait around all that time, and no way were we going to drive all that way back again, as the garden was about 30 miles or roughly 50 kms from our home.

On our back home through the beautiful small and historic Adelaide Hills town of Mt. Torrens, we planned to stop for Paladian to do her blip of one of the early settlers cottages. (She took the photos but didn't blip it, because she caught a lorikeet taking off from our deck on arriving back home.)

Next town was Woodside and a quick stop to grab a bite of lunch at a famous bakery there called the Lobethal Bakery. Highly recommended and doing a roaring trade. I thought of doing a Nanzy style blip of the main food counter but it was simply too packed for that sort of thing.

Lunch over, Paladian decided to drive down a back street to get back onto the main road, and see what I could see in the way of a blip. Found a huge old apple tree so laden with apples that some of the branches were trailing on the ground. Did some shots of the bunches of apples, not yet ripe and ready for sampling!

I then happened to look across the road and saw this absolutely magnificent horse grazing in the paddock, not far from the edge of the road. I did wish I had some carrots with me as the horse soon drifted over towards me to investigate, while I was snapping away and quickly changing settings. (The horse was dark against a very pale straw coloured background of dried grass). See him in better detail.

I love horses and I've never blipped a horse before, and isn't this chestnut coloured Bay an absolute beauty! He could well have been a racehorse, resting between training sessions, as there is a very famous Adelaide Hills Racecourse about 3 kms away called Oakbank.

Founded in 1876, the course is located in "blue grass" racing country. The pinnacle event being the Oakbank Easter Racing Carnival, attracting more than 100,000 visitors annually and qualifying as the world's biggest picnic race meeting. Oakbank Racecourse is home to jumps racing in South Australia, and combines this with flat racing to make two days of massive crowds on the Saturday and Monday of Easter each year.

Special Note to Paladian - always carry bread for birds and take carrots for other animals whenever we go on a drive! OK I will do the carrots and you can bring the bread!