A Sunday Afternoon Stroll

If you walk down our cul de sac you reach the main road between Ballarat and Geelong.  Across that road there are the Ballarat Technology Park, some state government and other buildings and the Federation University, all set in parkland and a forest.  There is a road running through the bottom part of the parkland called Wetlands Drive which runs along a small lake. There is also a bird watching hide. Sometimes, as I drive along, there is a bloke sitting on a fishing chair by the side of the lake.  But he isn't fishing - his labrador is swimming in the lake. There is a little footbridge, but I had no idea where it led to.

In the more than four years that we have lived in the Mount Helen area, I have never walked around that bit of the forest / parkland.

It was a beautiful day on Sunday. There was nothing much happening on Sunday afternoon. Jim, Brandy and Whiskey were dozing on the couch in front of the television. So I swapped my sandals for some closed shoes in case of snake-y encounters and trundled off down our road to have a bit of a poke around.

It wasn't a long walk, just over half an hour, and I discovered another small lake plus a creek bed with not much water in it.  We haven't had much rain recently so the wetlands were on the dry side. I suspect the creek can carry quite a bit of water when the rains come and the wetlands earn their name.

I hadn't realised that this little lake was here

The track only runs half way round it

We drive past this quite often.
It's on one of our regular routes to
Hill House

You can walk all the way around this lake

Baby ducks, a clear sign of late spring

Canadian Creek, not flowing
fast at the moment

University Roundabout

We briefly lived in one of the units

you can see opposite, before we moved

into our current house

I did my library degree at the University
when it was the Ballarat College
of Advanced Education.
The houses across the road weren't there then!

Standing at the bottom of our road,
looking towards the Krooze In Cafe

Heading home.
Ours is the last of the units you can see,
tucked under the trees

I'm off to visit Stella in the hospital today. We are hopeful that she will be able to go home on Thursday, although she will actually come to Hill House for a few days to recuperate.  Someone has suggested that she have an angiogram before she comes home, much to everyone's alarm. The last time she had one of those she bled vigorously into her groin and no one noticed until she had the most enormous bruise all over her body. She had to  stay in hospital for a further ten or so days, lying flat on her back. The time before that she ended up in ICU.  Angiograms really do not seem like A Plan.

We have now had ten consecutive days of no new Covid cases in Victoria and there are only 4 known active cases in the state. The ring of steel quarantining Metropolitan Melbourne from the rest of Victoria has come down. All Victorians can now travel around the state at will. I do not expect to be stopped at Checkpoint Charlie on my way home. I don't expect to be stopped for questioning about my movements at all.