Hunkering Down ….

Another entry, hot on the heels of the last - this is what happens when you have a little enforced ‘down time’! 

Today has been a day of hunkering down, cosy in our little Tree House, watch the storm batter the land outside. Amazingly, we are quite sheltered here, the hills behind seeming to protect us from the wind, but we look out at unrelenting near horizontal rain lashing the tree-clad hills beyond. We now the sea is out there, but can see nothing other than thick cloud. Vegetation is lush and complies with the wind’s  force, bending almost impossibly to its will - yet here, only the odd gust hits the tiny building. 

We’ve been warned that our internet will be poor, but it’s certainly good enough to research local road closures of which there are many  - both from flooding and slips somehow a ‘slip’ sounds far less menacing than a landslide). Tim, our host, comes round at midday to check we are OK and agrees that by tomorrow when the main storm has passed, we should be safe to get out and explore with care.

For now, it’s a chance to read and catch up with my journal entries - a welcome plus as I’m so far behind - and some editing and sorting of my photos. I’m disappointed with my shots of late; I feel I’m struggling to really capture the essence of the place. I know the weather hasn’t helped, and I think I need to abandon the struggle to reproduce the sunlit brightness I’ve expected, and just give in to the moodiness of the reality. 

Today, photography has obviously been limited, and I’m ‘cheating’ by using some from one of yesterday’s en route stops. Having picked up take-out coffees, we stopped further along our route at a lay-by with a lone picnic table, only to discover after we’d finished that there was a dirt track leading to beautiful Bream Bay where we briefly watched the already stormy sea as we looked over to Bream Head. And as an extra, you have the bizarre group of chickens who seemed to patrol the picnic area looking for food, lurking in the grasses until we left, then moving in!