Our local area

This is Six Mile Creek, still running despite how dry everything is. We've
had short, light showers only a couple of times since we arrived six weeks ago.

We've landed in a delightful area that I didn't know existed, though we've driven past many times. We're in basically in the same area as last time, just 6 km west in a neighbouring suburb. This suburb, Collingwood Park, is about 30 km south-west from Brisbane CBD in the neighbouring city of Ipswich and about 11 km east of Ipswich's CBD. 

It used to be a mining area, though I can only find information about one mine in the actual suburb. The area has a reputation from an incident of subsiding land that happened ten years ago and resulted in a group suing the government.

In any case, there isn't any mining happening here now, but there is nearby bushland to roam about in. In researching a little for this post I discovered the suburb has only a bit more than six thousand people living here. Population density is distinctly lower than what we're used to. Where we live in Tokyo there are more people per square kilometre than there is in this whole suburb. 

We're still close enough to major roads, though, so it's a convenient spot to be located for these months. The Ipswich motorway, a major east-west road, is only six minutes from our front door. School for our youngest is only six kilometres or 10 minutes away. Yesterday I drove to a doctor's clinic 27 kilometres away and it took me well under an hour. Granted I wasn't driving at peak commuting times, but it still surprises me how easy it is to get around in this spacious city. The roads are wide too, driving on them isn't so much a "dodge-em" exercise as it can be on the tiny roads in Tokyo. It's a good thing that driving isn't nearly so stressful as driving can be in Tokyo as we're doing whole heap more than we usually do. We can reach several decent shopping centres within 20 minutes by car, including a large grocery store just down the road (1.5km, which in Australian terms is very close).

Below is the view from our front door. The road seems a long way away! We can't quite see the horizon, but there's plenty of sky. Out behind our house is scrubland. So from our windows we can see gum trees in most directions.

Below is a Jacaranda tree in the car park of our home church (located just five minutes drive from our house). Church does have a car park, something we don't have in Tokyo.

A beautiful "mackerel sky" spotted last week at our local gym, where we're all exercising at least once, if not twice a week—it's between our house and the school.

I just love the blue skies (even though I know that means no rain). That blue is so common here that you can take it for granted...unless you've lived overseas. In Tokyo we rarely see such blue sky. 

This is a eucalyptus tree (colloquially known as "gum trees" in Australia) in the scrub behind our house.