FSO - Roads and Paths

I've decided to be a purist this week.  Oh, all right, I know that is a stretch of the imagination but all my photos this week have been taken in the past week and all are of the roads and paths I travel frequently, in most cases daily.

Every week day morning I travel to work along this road.  It twists and winds all the way until it reaches the highway.  On a very frequent basis I give thanks that I have such a lovely drive to town. 

When I first arrived in New Zealand, after living for seven years in the Outback, in North West Queensland, I was horrified about the number of corners, thought surely the early road surveyors were paid by the corner.  Now I find long, straight roads and highways boring to drive. 

I much prefer my roads to meander.  This next photo is the same road, taken just back around the corner, heading home towards Maungakaramea.  The tower on the highest hill is the one that features in nearly all my photos on the farm, as we live very close to it, more or less at its feet. 

Once you turn off the sealed road, the side roads also snake along, the only difference being a lot of them (such as ours) are not sealed.

Our country roads feature a lot of one lane bridges:

On Wednesday afternoon, as I was going home to the farm, I came across a council vehicle and two workmen spreading metal into the potholes.  Our road is a frightful mess at the moment, full of corrugations, muddy, slushy areas and potholes.  This is a good part of the road, compared to other spots.  The workmen wanted to know what I wanted the photos for before agreeing to me taking the photo.  Some local residents have been getting their photos in the local newspaper lately by collecting mud and metal in buckets and dumping them on the council doorstep as a protest.  I take a different approach, if I want to complain I will do it privately (and I have done so on occasion) but basically I'm happy to put up with the state of the road in exchange for the privelege of living in such a lovely part of the country.  There's always tradeoffs, I figure.  I choose to live here, crap roads are the price.  Once they knew I wasn't from the press, these guys were happy to have me take the shot and, although they looked serious, were all smiles once the photo was taken. 

Tuesday was a beautiful day, sunshine and blue skies, a lovely change after a lot of rain.  Mid afternoon I set out for what turned into a two hour ramble.  This is the path I followed.

When I was nearly back to the house I decided to visit once again the bottom waterfall.  There are three and I have very imaginatively named them top, middle and bottom.  If you look carefully you will see it and appreciate that finding a path to it was not easy.  I was aware of the fact that if I tripped and hurt myself no-one would find me for goodness knows how long, so I picked my way carefully.

Kate, the cat, had been my companion throughout the walk and, sure enough, there she was showing me the easy path through the undergrowth.

Finally I came to the path back up to the house from the creek.

The path turns to grass, widens and here we are at home again.

Thank you, Lena, for a great topic.  I've really enjoyed it. 

Oh, and I've discovered it's not that easy to be a purist, when you know you have photos in your archives you can use.  So I suppose I should rename this post "My roads and paths this week."  With my propensity to wander, they could be different next week. 

To see the road and paths of others just click here.  I'm sure they will be much grander but they won't be mine!