Nearly every day our four footed friends take us on a 4 kilometre walk around our suburb.
What follows is a pictorial record of that walk. The resolution of the photos is deliberately low to reduce the image loading time. Even so there is still nearly a megabyte of images to load so you might like to think about wether or not you wish to continue.
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| To give you a general idea of where our virtual Dog Walk is going, here is a map of our suburb with a smudge line roughly following the course of our walk. | |
| Here we are just coming out of our front yard and turning right to head towards the beach |  |
| At the end of our street we are able to take a pedestrian "shortcut" across the small stream that flows into the sea. We are very wary about using this bridge at night as the stream is of sufficient size to harbour at least one large crocodile. I definitely would not like to meet one! |  |
| Just a quick shot back across the bridge to give you a front view of our beautiful hounds. |  |
| Once across the bridge, we meet the esplanade proper. Here we begin out walk along the wide Nature Strip that separates the sea from the road and the first row of houses. |  |
| The low logs set into the ground provide us with endless opportunity to show off how well trained the dogs are. They will usually do this a few times and then suddenly discover "doggie" things that urgently require them to be elsewhere. That "elsewhere" usually means just far enough away so that we can't order them to do more jumps. |  |
| Many years ago there was a fierce storm which blew this (then) young tree down. The tree just continued to grow horizontally and the result you can see for yourself. |  |
| Moving on the walk just continues to be boringly beautiful. We are more or less responsible for the visible path you can see worn in here and in some other photos as we have been doing this walk just about every day for nearly 8 years. |  |
| Just beyond this stand of trees there is a water tap. Many years ago we made the mistake of thinking the dogs looked thirsty and that perhaps they would like a drink. Due to genetically programmed cattle dog obsessional behaviour, we have since stopped there for a drink every day ever since. The dogs do no more than taste the water (perhaps to see if it has changed since yesterday) and then we move on. But we cannot go past without stopping...... |  |
| Here we have arrived at a popular spot for locals. The reason is that just off shot is a couple of open air fresh water showers. They aren't immediately obvious so tourists and visitors tend to not know they are there. Our Dogs like the old log as it is a bit of a graffiti wall for every dog in the neighbourhood. A sort of low tech canine Usenet discussion group of a sort.... |  |
| At this point I stepped down to the beach to take North and South looking shots. This is the shot looking North towards Palm Cove. It is about 4km to Palm Cove, we occasionally walk along the sand and then back along the highway. Anyway, the photos give you the idea |  |
| This shot looks South toward Kewarra beach with Taylor Point in the background. At Kewarra beach there are frequently large numbers of young Swedish women staying at the resort there. Given their generally somewhat "optional" view of beach clothing, this view can sometimes be one to get a blokes pulse moving. Regretfully they are out of season at the moment so the beach is devoid of bare breasted Nordic blondes.....Sigh! |  |
| Just past the log there are a number of walkways to
allow access to the beach. One of these provides Gamble
with the opportunity of showing how agile a 9 year old
dog can be. Gamble has always been exceptionally strong
for her size (as a number of innocent people, one builder
and one burglar have found out), anyway she clear jumps
the two logs you see here. Rosie wimps out and takes them as two separate jumps. |
 |
| Here we continue on towards the point where we turn inland to head towards the highway and home. During the months that it rains this is one of our favourite spots as the canopies of the palm trees give you almost complete respite from the rain. Back in my evil days as a cigarette smoker this was the only place I could light up if it was raining. |  |
| Now we turn towards the Highway. This bit is not in anyway remarkable other than the fact that it is a damm side more uphill than it looks..... The hills in the background are nice too. |  |
| Well, here we are, homeward bound on the highway. This is actually a remnant of the original Cook Highway, no longer connected to the current one. Single lane bitumen and overhanging trees... |  |
| At this point we are nearly ready to turn off the highway and head down our own street. Please note the heavily congested traffic. And of course the hills as a backdrop to it all. |  |
| Well, we've turned off the highway and are now back in our street. To prevent cars using the nature strip as a short cut there are a number of logs set into the ground here as well. Another opportunity for Rosie to show off.. |  |
| Almost home and I forgot to take a photo at the top of the street. So here is one looking back instead. |  |
| We are home. Here is our cat greeting the dogs. For people who haven't seen our animals together before they usually expect the dogs to tear the cat to pieces. This expectation has, over the years, nearly resulted in accidents as rubber-neckers wanting to see blood, forget to watch where they are going. |  |
| Seeing as this is the only other decent photo we have of Pushkin, she had better sneak in here for a finale. Her main claim to fame is that she weighs in excess of 10kg. The person who gave her to us claimed that she was "part Russian blue". We doubt this greatly. |  |
That's it....We hope you enjoyed our virtual dog walk around Clifton Beach, Queensland Australia.
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