Taking photographs is one of the ways to keep myself amused while the lock down is still on, although it’s slowly letting up with W.A. opening some of it’s internal travel restrictions. Just outside of the cottage where I’m staying there’s a birdbath that’s proving to be a great joy with a wide variety of birds visiting it through the day.
Obviously social distancing rules don’t apply to everyone, that’s one crowded bath. So how hard is it when your living a “van life” to suddenly be required to lock down and not go anywhere? A large part of life in a van tends to consist of using public spaces and places so to have these taken away puts you in a bit of a pickle.
I’m not sure why I’m writing a post about this, perhaps just the feeling that I need to speak out and say something, because I’m not there, not able to physically do something to help in any way. To those who don’t know details, don’t understand what is going on here in Australia at the moment, the country is on fire. The country has been on fire for a while but it’s getting worse a month into Summer and already over 12 million acres have burnt.
I’ve been living in the Sprinter van for 6 months now, some of that time was on a trip north up near Broome, then heading south for the spring wildflowers but much of the time has been spent living around town in the burbs of Perth. Perhaps the longest period I’ve spent living in the one area while in a van, at least the longest period while free camping the whole time. Living in the one area is very different to travelling around, you start to have regular places you go for eating, toilets, showers and sleeping, while if you are travelling around every place is new.
I left Perth of a mission to drive the loop up towards Broome hugging the coastline before returning down the inland route following the wildflowers, a great trip of diversity. Beautiful ocean views, rugged coast lines and pristine beaches followed by wide open inland spaces with endless skies and carpets of colour. It was a good test for the van, over 5000km in just over a month through a wide variety of country.
Looking through a backup drive I found hundreds of old pictures from the past 18 years of my backyard, produce I’ve grown and aquaponic systems that I’ve built, so I thought I’d put the best of them into one post so that I have a reference. The picture above was three different varieties of beefsteak tomatoes from the “crazy tomato year”. I grew about 40 different varieties of tomatoes in the one year.
This is going to be a post filled with plant pictures, it’s been a while since I posted up a selection of plant pictures and they keep building up as I regularly go out and take more pictures. I just spent a whole day out at kings park taking photos even though I have dozens that I need to put up already.
Getting oh so close to finished now. A quick trip up to Perth as I had a warning light show up on the van which needed seeing too, turned out to be an intermittent fault with the alternator that’s being replaced today. This has given me a good chance to have a bit of a shake down of the van, see how all the living aspects of of the fit out are working or are going to work in real life.
