Of travels and backyard life. . .

I can hardly believe we're leaving for our trip to the Great Barrier Reef tomorrow. We flying in to Cairns (pronounced without the "r"), and then renting a car and driving up to Palm Cove, which is supposed to be a cool tropical resort. The last time we stayed in a tropical resort was years ago when Beth was 12 and Sarah was 3. They're older than that now. . .                                                                                                                                              There is nothing like air travel in Australia to impress you with how very big the continent/country is. The distance on the map takes 4 hours to traverse. In a plane. That's like flying from New York to LA. Is that right? Check me on that. Anyway, we'll be re-entering warm weather, and hope to snorkel on the reef. The OTHER thing, though, is that The Great Barrier Reef really isn't an exaggeration. It. Is. Huge. We will only see a very small part, which is probably better for the health of the reef, anyway.

I also wanted to finish up my thoughts on our back patio and our urban fauna. The very evening of the day that I wrote about bats in Royal Park, we saw tons of bats flying over our little tiny piece of sky over our patio. That's never happened before. Who knew bats could read? Unfortunately, in all the excitement and darkness (it was late dusk) I couldn't get the phone's flash to turn off, so I didn't get any images of the bats. But here are a couple images of our piece of sky. Both taken with my IPhone 6-point-something. My Dad, who was a serious photographer, would have been even more amazed by these little phones than I am. And then there's the software. All three of these images looked pretty black until I photoshop'd them. Unbelievable. The camera sees what the eye can't. 

That night with the bats in our patio sky was apparently a one-off, as they like to say here. We haven't seen them again, which is a little sad. I'm thinking it must have just been the press I gave them.

The guy who I did get an image of was the possum, below, on our fence. Not the best shot. Sorry about that. It's true that the little guy looks pretty rat-like in this image, but they really are more squirrel-like than this image suggests. Blame it on the photographer. And by the way, that guy is pretty big. . . .2 feet long with the tail, and he's considered a small one.  No rabies to worry about here, though!