Here’s my little contribution for the lovely @gumnut-logic world windows - Edinburgh, Scotland
This is where I was lucky enough to grow up And even though i’m not based here any more, it’s only a 50 minute drive to my parents house in the south of the city. (All of these photos are actually my dads as he is a vastly superior photographer to me and has kindly given his permission for me to borrow them for this)
Edinburgh castle and city taken from the Braid Hills which is where my parents house is. Although it’s zoomed in, this is essentially the view I have from my bedroom window when I visit. The river is the Forth and the hills on the background are actually in Fife which is another county.
The Forth bridges, again taken from the Braid Hills. The big pointy one is the newly completed Queensferry Crossing which takes road traffic north from Edinburgh to Fife and beyond. Behind it, you can see the towers of the old (and imaginatively named) Forth Road Bridge which the new crossing replaced. Nestled almost under the bigger bridges are the red humps of the Forth Rail Bridge which is 130 years old now and still going strong.
Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags in winter, still looking north from the Braid Hills. A lot of the topography in Edinburgh comes from the last ice age where the volcanic rock of the city formed an impenetrable barrier to the ice sheets. The softer rock was gouged away leaving the old plugs from long extinct volcanoes exposed. Arthur’s Seat and the Crags are great examples of that, as is Castle Rock.
Another view of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags, this time from closer to the city centre and with a sliver of the castle rock in the picture too. One thing I love about the city is that you’re never far from green space and a walk up the various hills is a popular activity on nice days
The city centre. The dark rock on the left is Castle Rock again so this is right in the heart of the city. The giant rocket shaped thing on the right is the Scott Monument which was built in 1840 to commemorate the writer Sir Walter Scott, and the big building with the clock tower is the Balmoral Hotel. The columns in the background are a national monument to the Scottish casualties from the Napoleonic wars. Unfortunately when they were building it they ran out of money so it’s been unfinished since 1829. Next to it is Nelsons monument which was once used as a timekeeping device by sailors in the Forth river as there’s a ball on the top which slowly rises to the top and then drops at 1pm every day. I think it still works although don’t quote me on that!
Anyway, there’s a wee tour around Scotland’s capital! Sorry it turned into a history lesson - apparently school wasn’t completely lost on me!
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Here’s what I propose. We’re all stuck inside. Let’s face it. We’re going to be stuck inside for awhile. However, we weren’t always stuck inside and this is a perfect opportunity to share some photos of the world around us.
So, I’m thinking, pick a place you love, or somewhere you would like to share, and grab a few shots to show everyone. You can talk about that place, why you love it. Don’t forget to mention where it is, cos geographic geeks like me need to know these things.
Hey, I’ve never been outside of Australia. Show me your backyard, and I’ll show you mine :D
For fun, tag it #WorldWindows2020 if you want to. You can include videos and art if you like. Just take a moment to share a little bit of the world we can’t go out and explore at the moment. And remember, your backyard is likely somewhere I have never been, so I’m likely to find it more interesting than you, so share away.
As for me, I may have not have left the Australian shores, but I’ve taken thousands of photos of them :D So there will be beaches, birds, wildlife and my favourite spots in this tiny corner I call home. I hope you enjoy them.
I’ve only recently managed to get into video, so there is only a few of those, but above you can see one I took last year. (Link if Tumblr is being stupid - https://youtu.be/3IDdOqldfvM ) This is the same beach that I posted about a couple of weeks ago. Daly Head on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia.
I don’t have hugely high end camera equipment, but I do have a good zoom lens on my fancy compact camera. The photo below is where I took the video of the dolphins from. :D I was a long, long way away and I didn’t have a tripod, so my elbows were on that railing holding the camera as still as I could at full zoom . So that is why it is far from stable, but watchable at least :D
So I was about a third of the way down those massive stairs. The reason I wasn’t all the way down was because I had a splitting migraine at the time. I’d just driven a good seventy kilometres and the headache developed in transit. So when I finally got there and parked up on the headland, I felt awful and had to make the decision not to go down there. I planned to snooze in the car for a few crucial minutes while the family explored and take some drugs, but my eldest daughter came running all the way up those stairs, from the bottom, to tell me there were dolphins. So I dragged myself out of the car and the above video is the result. Kinda worth it, really.
Here be a couple more shots of that beach. I’ve been there twice now (the beach is a good 300kms from home), but only on the sand once. Top photo is from 2017 in the late afternoon and the dolphin ones are from March 2019.
It is seriously a gorgeous beach. And yeah, I have lots of photos of beaches and waves :D I hope you enjoyed this little snapshot of my corner of the planet.
Nutty
(beach nut who has cymophobia and swims like a rock)
This is one of the islands lining the outerbanks of North Carolina.
The waters are a little chilly, but worth wading into.
Surprisingly, there are not a lot of tourist areas around this beach. Most of the structures are homes or villas. We were hard pressed to find a hotel. Honestly, this is one of the most peaceful beach towns I've ever been to and we loved it!
@gumnut-logic Panoramic video I took while sitting on a wooden sculpture/structure (look at those clouds). North Kent Plain of Natural Beauty, England.
Apparently there's a cold war bunker in the area, but I haven't found it yet.
I love this place, unfortunately due to the lockdown there are a lot more people around than usual, and the wildlife (minus bumble bees) is keeping a low profile.
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Visit Long Bay, Auckland, New Zealand with @onereyofstarlight
Visit Adelaide beaches, South Australia, with me.
This is for @plantmuffin , stemming from a brief discussion about beaches this morning.
Adelaide sits on the coast of St Vincent’s Gulf, facing west. This makes for great sunsets and moody ocean. The majority of our weather comes from the west/south-west, so that leaves our side of the gulf a little more vulnerable to the weather, though most of the time it is mostly sheltered surf. But as you can see in the ‘mild’ storm at Glenelg above, the jetties all along the coast, can take a pounding and most of them have lost their ends and used to be much longer in sailing days or the early nineteen hundreds.
Above: Cranky Glenelg Beach 14 Apr 2018. Glenelg is the main tourism beach in Adelaide. It is where the colonists landed back in 1836. It is the destination of the only tram left in South Australia. It doesn’t usually look like this :D
Below is Somerton Beach, first looking south, then north, my closest beach (about 7.5kms from my house). Somerton Beach is the next named beach south of Glenelg (really it is just one great long beach from Outer Harbour in the north to Kingston Park in the south, but we give bits of it different names, usually associated with the suburb attached to it. You used to be able to walk the length of it in one go, but they have since built marinas and things that interrupt the coastline. If you head out directly west, about 50kms out, you’d hit the Yorke Peninsula.
West Beach, to the north of Glenelg, looking north...
As you move up the coast (north) the sand strip gets wider because of longshore drift. This is Grange Jetty (in 2006, haven’t been there for sometime as I live towards the south of the city).
There are multiple jetties jutting out into the Gulf the entire length of the coast. This is a thing for South Australia because before roads were built, the only way to get anywhere was by sea. Many of these jetties remain and are used by fishermen. Walking the jetty is kinda a tradition. See a jetty, you walk out to the end of it regardless of the weather. There are so many jetties along the coast in Adelaide, you can see them from each other. This is a shot of Henley Jetty to the south of Grange Jetty, from Grange Jetty. In the very distance you can see the hotels of Glenelg and beyond that is the Adelaide Hills which meet the sea at Kingston Park, ending the massive Holdfast Bay.
The most northern beaches are massively wide with sand. This is Largs North (I think). It again was a very windy day even though it was December at the time.
But the closest beaches to me are Somerton and Brighton, to the south of Glenelg, and these are the beaches I grew up visiting to ‘swim’ as a kid.
Brighton Beach...
Beyond Brighton Beach to the south is Kingston Park and the coastline dissolves into a rocky shore that has its own beauty.
From Brighton Jetty...
Kingston Park rocks...
And yes, I like taking photos at sunset :D
So, yeah, manhandled beaches, but these are the beaches I grew up with. To the south we have the Fleurieu Peninsula and our connection with the Southern Ocean. Travel a good 100kms north and you reach the top of the Gulf and can turn onto the Yorke Peninsula that has its own beauty, but these are the Adelaide beaches. The beaches of my home :D
Visit Parts of Sussex, England, including a Hobbit House with @weirdburketeer
Visit Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire, England with @weirdburketeer
Visit the first half of the Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia with me.
Thank you wonderful peeps for participating. If you have some favourite places you would like to share while we are all stuck at home, simply post some photos and tag #WorldWindows2020 (tagging me also helps so I can add your Window to the list). Remember, your backyard is exotic to people on the other side of the world (like me).
Today I’m jumping over the border to visit the Great Ocean Road in Victoria (our next door neighbours and violent opposition on the AFL football field and tongue-in-cheek nemesis everywhere else :D ).
The Great Ocean Road is a picturesque coastal drive that starts basically in Torquay and ends in Warrnambool. Or in the opposite direction if you are travelling from the Adelaide side. It is 243 kilometres long.
Oooh, a map.
When we travel it, we usually split it into two days, one for each side and how ever many days we’d like to stay in the middle.
I’ve done it both ways, on the way to Melbourne and on the way back. Kinda convenient that it is ‘on the way’ between Melbourne and Adelaide. We usually stay at Apollo Bay near the bottom, though last time we stayed at Marengo which is a little further south.
The Melbourne side (the east side) is not a road for the sufferer of motion sickness.
It is a very wiggly road and it goes for over one hundred kilometres.
The road runs right along the coast, so you basically get to see the ocean almost the entire way.
The hills, as you travel further south, become covered in ferns. At the bottom of the great triangle shape you have the Ottways, a mountain range covered in temperate rainforest protected by a national park.
Basically, we park ourselves around Apollo Bay to recover from the crazy drive (it requires some concentration being so wiggly). We usually stay a few days so we can explore the region, particularly the forest and the waterfalls.
The above forest shots were taken in Winter 2015 (the sunny beach and road shots are from 2007). Throughout part of the forest in this last shot (a random spot we pulled over) there were dozens of these gorgeous spiderwebs.
There are a series of dirt roads (well maintained gravel actually, I only have a two wheel drive) that wind through the forest covered hills. One of them we visit every time we go, mostly because I’m a creature of habit and love to revisit familiar places. Right in the middle of all this native ecosystem is a copice of sequoias. Yep, those giant conifers from California. This is a typical thing in Australia, I find. The early European settlers were desperate to add northern hemisphere stuff. While I sometimes get annoyed regarding this because exotics usually get loose and destroy the ecosystem, the sequoias don’t tend to do that and it gives me, as a continent-bound person, the chance to see these magnificent trees. We have three up in the Adelaide Hills as well. Of course, they are only about one hundred years old, so they aren’t huge or anything, but fascinating nonetheless.
I’m only doing the eastern side of the Road for this post, so I will finish off with some shots from Apollo Bay and Marengo.
This is a shot from Marengo Tourist Park looking back towards Apollo Bay first thing in the morning (I have a problem with my back and holiday beds usually have me out of bed early and hurting...but hey, sunrise photography :D). It is a gorgeous little area, complete with all the civilised luxuries, but very close to nature (the way I like it :D).
Here is the shot I was taking out to the ocean at the time.
The Tourist Park is right on the coast on a rocky headland - the reason why I chose it. I spent some time down on those rocks exploring :D Found a few sea creatures to oggle at, too.
A few starfish :D
Lots of shellfish, which at the time I was inspired to photograph for painting stock :D
Here’s a shot of the oceanward side of the outcrop,
Up in the park we were able to interact with some of the local birds as well.
This is a male King Parrot. We were able to feed it apple on the front deck of our cabin. The kids had a great experience (they were only five and seven at the time).
And this one is a crimson rosella, a rather common eastern states parrot (not so common in South Australia, but we have colour variants instead with the Adelaide Rosella and the Yellow Rosella).
And to finish off, here is a sunrise in March 2007 from the other side of Apollo Bay, looking back up the length of the eastern side of the Great Ocean Road.
@onereyofstarlight Hope you enjoyed :D More about the other side tomorrow :D
I’ve lost a post from @lightning1999 I can’t find it :’( Will repost it if I can (I dropped the ball badly).
Visit Piccaninnie Ponds, South Australia with me.
These posts take a considerable amount of time and with my return to work, I haven’t been able to fit them in :( I may continue them about once a week if I can.
If you have some favourite places you would like to share while we are all stuck at home, simply post some photos and tag #WorldWindows2020 (tagging me also helps so I can add your Window to the list). Remember, your backyard is exotic to people on the other side of the world (like me).
Today I have dug up an event from March 2006. I was in the south-east of South Australia on a beach where the Piccaninnie Ponds release into the ocean.
Map for Piccaninnie Ponds
The south-east of South Australia is a geologically fascinating area with a combination of Australia’s youngest volcanoes and a limestone landscape full of caves. I’m not going to go into depth about them here (plenty of time for that later), but I will mention that the limestone that underlies the area transports water in the form of springs. Piccaninnie Ponds is one such major spring. It is a world famous dive site and an important karst wetland.
But anyway, funnily enough that isn’t what this post is about.
This is about me arriving on the beach where the wetlands drain to the sea at about 5pm towards the end of March 2006.
This is what the beach looks like during the middle of the day (this photo is from my most recent visit in October 2018).
The water in the foreground is fresh water gushing into the ocean from the springs.
In 2006 we were on our way back from Nelson, Victoria, just over the border (this beach is the last bit of South Australian beach before you hit the border) and we stopped to walk on the beach (one of my favourite activities). I took one look at the sky and decided we were staying for sunset (approximately three hours away...yes, my hubby is the most patient man on the planet). I am so glad we did.
This is where the springs emoerge from the bushland.
I got somewhat fascinated by the light on the water.
And the sky.
There was a change coming in and it was perfect.
Towards the end there were some boys playing cricket on the beach.
It was an absolutely magical sunset. Hubby ended up dragging me off the beach as the sun finally started to disappear.
There are plenty more photos, but I’ll leave it there. I do have to say that, taking the moment (or the three hours) to watch the world around you...it’s worth it.
