Going away tomorrow

We will be heading off tomorrow morning for points south of here, stopping at Cooma for a few days. While I am away there may not be many chances to update my blog so it may have to wait until we come home, but I will see what I can do - we don't have a laptop, but internet access is usually available at libraries and some cafes. Even small country towns are becoming more civilised these days.

The picture at the top of my blog was taken just on a year ago in Dungowan valley north-east of Tamworth, it's beautiful country. My maternal grandfather grew up not far from here. The road through the valley was used as early as the 1830s to move stock to the coast, and there are quite a few markers showing sites of previous buildings - schools, shops, houses. His parents moved to the area in the 1870s and he was the seventh child in a family of eleven, eight boys and three girls. His mother, my great-grandmother, was 19 when she had her first child and 46 when the last was born, what a life she must have had. I wish I could have known her but she died when my mother was a baby.