Blast from the Past: Modeling Career

1969

It wasn’t a long career … if I recall correctly, it lasted all of one day :-)

I have no recollection of how mom’s hairdresser convinced this essentially shy girl to be a hair model, but here’s proof that I agreed to a short stint on the catwalk!

İzmİr, Turkey

Gift From the Sea-Revisited

We're taking a few days vaca at Jekyll Island, GA. I'm reading Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh for the ninth time. It's a book that I never get tired of. If you've never read it, you must. It speaks to every stage of a woman's life.
As I was reading today, a sentence resonated with me. It said, "One falls under their (waves) spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which on lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings."
I want all my yesterday's scribblings to be erased. I'm up at 1:00 a.m. right now unable to sleep. I'm all out of sorts from all the travelling we've been doing for the past three months. The older I get, the less flexible I get about getting away from my usual routine. Or maybe it's just the back-to-back trips we've been making. Whatever it is, I'm topsy-turvy, and I don't like it.
So while we're here at the beach, I hope to lie flat and let the sun and surf do its good work.

I Made It!

The engagement party went off without a hitch on Friday night.  We had a cookout at a local state park.  Here's the cake I made for them; camo and girly pink.  It was a cute idea, but my execution left a lot to be desired.  Cake decorating is not on my list of talents!  Oh well, everyone thought it was cute anyway.
We had a crowd for Easter dinner.  Lots of good food and fellowship.  The kiddos had a great time hunting the eggs.  I had a great time hiding them.  I kept finding myself smiling and remembering the past when all the cousins would gather at Grandma Collins' house to hunt eggs.  I was telling my mama what a good time I had hiding the eggs and remembering all the hunts we had at Grandma's house.  Mama said that she just loved hiding the eggs too.  There were probably a hundred or more since there were so many cousins hunting them.
So hopefully this week will be a little slower and calmer; at least until Friday.  The whole weekend will be spent in celebrating our church's 25th anniversary.  There'll be lots of friends back to help celebrate, so it'll be good to renew relationships.  Summer, please come quickly!  I'm ready for a laid-back state of mind.  All these schedules are makin' me crazy!

Forest Bellflower

Forest Bellflower, originally uploaded by ParsecTraveller.

I found this campanula down by a stream in Dolomieu, France. There were many flowers down there, as well as mushrooms. I tried to do a little exploring, but I heard that vipers lived down in wet areas, so that shot that idea down.

Northamptonshire Round - NR 1 Holcot to Sywell Country Park

With Marta. The footpahts in the first part were not very clearly marked, but manageable with map. Downpour before we started, but fine rest of the day. Just over 7.5 miles.




Marta and I were a little stumped for our next long-distance walk. This is close enough to home, and only 51 miles in all. We'll visit areas that I don't know, south of Northampton , and some more familiar territory on the way.





Clear and detailedinstructionsfor this section are onThe Ten Foot Club website. We seem to have walked an extra mile! The Ten Foot Club are the guys who set the round up.

Miss out the next paragraphs ** to ** if you don't want to read my grouses!



**We didn't get off to a great start - I was grumpy after yesterday's disappearing footpath experience, Marta was a bit tired. We were going to park at Pitsford reservoir by the dam, but just as we got there the heavens opened, so we diverted to the Visitor Centre for a coffee, foolishly assuming the parking tickets would be transferable.



More grumpiness when we discovered that the café doesn't open until ten, and the tickets are not transferable. Luckily we can always produce a black coffee from our portable coffee stop kit, and we decided to give Pitsford Water a miss - we've been there so many times already, anyway. So - we started our walk from the village of Holcot!**

Holcot church

The phone box has a new use

Just opposite the church and phone box book exchange is a footpath between the houses. There is even a NR sign, so we walk through the passageway, and then turn left and downhill along Poplars Lane to Walgrave Road. Here we turn right and on the corner there's a footpath sign leading us through a gateway guarded by two eagles.

The way is not very clear, but turns sharp left at the gates and follows the field boundary for a couple of hundred yards. There is a footbridge, but it's overgrown and people obviously take an easier route round the culvert.

Then the path goes uphill diagonally. We went a bit too far to our right, and had to correct our route. Some of the field boundaries may have changed since the OS map was last revised. Another case of "clear on the map not on the ground".





Our route may be not quite right, but we either follow field edges or footpaths, and manage to get ourselves on track again.



For a short distance the way is clear and we meet the bridleway which leads us to the A43 - which we have to cross. We turn left along the road for a hundred yards - a closer look at the map shows we should have turned right and found the footpath in the layby. No matter - we use a wide bridleway leading toward Hardwick Lodge, and then turning to the right towards Hardwick Short Wood and Sywell Wood. Once more there are footpath waymarks and NR ones too.

A friendly fence repairer.

The path comes out near Wood Lodge Farm, and when we reach the road we turn left and walk the rather busy quarter mile or so to the turn off for Mears Ashby, on the Beckwith's Emporium Corner. A quick wander through there - but we decide it's too busy and too posh for today, so make our way to the village. This road is very quiet once you pass the Emporium!

Our route takes us round the village - a pretty one - and we stop for a sandwich at the Griffin Inn.

The rest of the route is straightforward - the footpath goes off to our left after Mears Ashby Hall. After a short wooded section near the wall it heads southwest, slightly to our right, across a large field to the Mears Ashby-Earls Barton road. The gap in the hedge is a bit overgrown and the road's a bit busy, but it's a short distance to the path on the other side.

From here it's plain walking and gently downhill towards Sywell Reservoir and Country Park. Seven a half miles in all.



Wildlife spotted: one hare, quite close by, and a buzzard circling and mewing. Lots of butterflies.

Memorable Day!

It's not been often recently I've had the chance to spend a day walking in one of the nearby National Parks after heavy rain, after all, it's not often recently we've even had heavy rain. So even when I awoke and heard the wind threatening to tear the Gold Coast apart at 4.15am this morning, it didn't take me long to decide to go out and ride against it toward Springbrook regardless. Like most headwinds, it didn't seem so bad once I got into the ride and developed a rhythm (even if it did slow me down just a touch), and it wasn't long before I started the climb.
Of course, Springbrook is a great climb, and it was worth noting that despite the sun gradually moving higher into the sky as I did this, I managed to lose 7 degrees in temperature on the way up. Eventually I got to start the walk at 7.55am -- the 17km Warrie Circuit (it would be 19km after the detour to Twin Falls pool). From the first steps I could hear the sound of tumbling waterfalls, and I knew this would be a memorable day. So it proved, although the spray of the first waterfall I walked under was freezing!

I've posted most of these pictures into a slideshow using Yahoo photos (there are 25 in all), which can be viewed here. Perhaps I'll reveal some more in coming days. However, there are a couple of things I want to note this evening:

This particular waterfall wasn't considered worthy of a name by those who named all the others in the park. However, it's remarkable not just for it's beauty, but also for the fact that it now looks exactly the same as it did in 2002, when the rainfall was considerably less than what it has been recently, and all the other waterfalls were drying up. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but it did somehow. It's also the wildflower season, and with the higher than usual rainfall last month, there appear to be some different ones blooming.

A couple of other shots from the day:



Incidentally, after the walk I headed for Best of All Lookout (which I've posted pictures of in previous entries). It's worth noting that at around 2pm, the temperature there was still only 11 degrees C. So much for Queensland being hot all the time! As can be seen from the pictures, the forecast sleet didn't eventuate this morning, and I'm not so sure I'm happy about that. Photography is always easier on overcast days.

San Diego link

In a corner of Princes Street Gardens, in the lee of Edinburgh Castle, is this link with San Diego. Edinburgh has a famous dog, Greyfriars Bobby, who kept watch over the grave of its master for 14 years. San Diego has a similarly famous dog, Bum, who was, as the plaque says, a 'devoted vagabond dog'. Photo credits here go to my daughter.