02-21-2020: Somersby Falls

We had a bit of a lazy morning today. There’s always laundry to do after a trip like we took, so I did that. Lou took care of his birds and got the lawn mower out to mow down the 8-inch grass growing in his back garden. We can’t believe how much the grass has grown since the rains came. And then we drove out to Somersby where Banjo has been staying with Mike, Marilyn and their daughter Sandy Lee. They live on an 80-acre spread that is wrapped around by Brisbane Water National Park. It is quite remote and when they bought the property about 25 years ago it was a bushfire damaged property. The house had burned down and so Mike and Marilyn built a new house using fire resistant materials and no timber. It’s an amazing property with large paddocks for horses, swimming pool, tennis court, gardens, and several sheds. It’s a beautiful place.

Marilyn had prepared a nice lunch for us, unexpectedly, because Lou had left his phone in Gloria’s car when we took it back to them, so he hadn’t received Marilyn’s text about lunch. It was very nice to spend some time with Marilyn and Mike. Sandy Lee has not been feeling well and is recovering from a recent fall from a horse. She fractured the head of her humerus in the fall so she has limited movement currently. She is a special needs person. Mike, as I mentioned, has frontal-temporal syndrome and is failing, so Marilyn has her hands full caring for Sandy and Mike in addition to managing the home and property.

Marilyn and Mike

After lunch Marilyn drove us a short way to Somersby Falls, a very nice stair-step type falls having 3 main falls. While Fitzroy Falls was awesome in a spectacular sense, Somersby Falls was a much more intimate setting. There were a couple of overlooks, but one can walk out onto the smooth rock creek beds both at the top and bottom of each falls. Marilyn has to drive through this creek on the rock creek bed a little further up the creek to get to their property down a a narrow bush track.

We walked down to the base of the middle falls and strolled around the creek bed. The place reminded me a lot of our Salt Springs park.

The hike down to the view of the lower falls was steep and in places, quite treacherous so Christine stayed at the middle falls while I went down to the lower falls. It was picturesque and I was fascinated by the large tree that was growing out of a crack between two rocks. It’s amazing how trees can grow in the barest of places.

I hiked back up to meet up with Christine and we wandered around the creek bed above the upper falls. There were amazing round holes in the rock, some of them perfectly round. I don’t know what would have caused this because there wasn’t a gorge or escarpment above that would have dripped water causing erosion.

Here’s a couple of other things we saw.

Marilyn arrived back from her shopping run to pick us up at the falls and she surprised us with a gift. We are now officially Aussies! It was so touching for her to have bought us hats. Thank you so very much, Marilyn. We love you.

After our lovely outing to Marilyn and Mike’s and to Sombersby Falls, we headed home for a quiet evening at home.

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