A quick post tonight.

First and most important.

My daughters E and Io safely left Toowoomba today.

They drove south along the New England Highway to Armidale about five hours away in NSW. Their Grandma (my Mum) has made her way across to there and they are staying together for the night.

The roads North, East and West are still closed by flood-waters.
The New England Highway runs along the Great Dividing Range and although it was cut by floods in a few places it had cleared by this morning.

The only thing that made their trip slower than normal was police had checkpoints on some of the bridges that had been flooded. They were enforcing a 5 tonne limit on those bridges until Engineers have been able to check them for structural soundness. So there are definitely no trucks rolling on the highway.

The flood crisis in Queensland is very far from over, but at least I can breathe a little easier knowing my girls are headed in the direction of home.

Now on a cheerier note a few piccies from our first day in Tassie.

We flew into Launceston which is by Aussie standards very old having been founded in 1806.These shops are typical of the buildings in the centre of town being from the late Nineteenth Century.

Running right through the centre of Launceston is the amazing Cascade Gorge.At the top end of the town Launceston has taken advantage of the natural wonder on their doorstep by establishing a park at the Upper Basin.This old suspension bridge crosses the top end of the gorge.I thought these rocks silhouetted against the sky were worth capturing. At the bottom end the gorge flows into the Tamar River. The wrought iron King's Bridge spans the river here.

An old house falling into ruin that we happened to passNorth of Launceston the Tamar broadens into a wide estuary the only bridge crossing downstream of Launceston is the Tasman Suspension Bridge.Now finally,
Over the past couple of weeks I have been a vey bad blogosphere citizen as I have absolutely failed to respond to any comments or visit many of your blogs.

In my defence of course I was away, and since I have been back we have been somewhat distracted by the QLD floods.

All I can say is I am most sorry and I will try to be less naughty over the coming weeks.

Queensland Floods

In the past 24 hours or so many of you will have seen images of deadly flash floods in Toowoomba in Queensland, with 9 confirmed dead and 59 people missing.

First of all I need to say we live around 1300 kilometres from Toowoomba two states away, so Deb, Lu and myself are safe and well having made our way home from Tassie on Sunday night. My older girls E and Io are also safe, more about that in a moment.

However, the floods have struck pretty close to home for me.

I have occasionally said I am originally a Queenslander, well Toowoomba used to be my home town. The images of the floods are all from areas I know intimately, it is quite sobering to see a place you have fond feelings for ripped to pieces.

Back to my older two E and Io. Because of our ties to Queensland our “big girls” went on a road trip before Christmas.

Their destination - Toowoomba.

I found out about the floods through a phone call from E yesterday afternoon. She warned me that we would hear terrible news about Toowoomba in the evening. She was getting in first to let us know that she and her sister are safe so we wouldn’t have to worry.

They are staying at a friend’s house that is well above the floods.

The only slight issues are: they are cut off in Toowoomba, all roads out of the town are still cut; they have to boil water before drinking it because of contamination fears; and there is no bread or milk left in the remaining shops.

So given what might have been we are very fortunate.

Hopefully some more cheerful posts in the next few days.