Déja Vu (of the Driving Down a Mountain in the Rain Variety)

Yesterday we went up to the Lamington National Park with Rachel and Gavin for a day's bushwalking while Eloise was in nursery.

It took us a couple of hours to get there via Beenleigh and Canungra; the last leg up a winding country road, one-lane in places, reminiscent of the dreaded Mount Glorious road on which we famously came unstuck, quite literally, with disastrous results. Though, to be fair, not as steep.

It was a bright sunny day, although true to form the weather this week has been pretty bad, intermittently at least, with frequent thunderstorms rattling across the Gold Coast in particular... which is near where we were going.

The weather forecast said not to worry though and off we toddled.

We did the tree-top walk, which you'll remember consists of a wooden walkway suspended in the treetops, and a ladder which leads up into a very tall tree from which there are commanding views across the volcanic outriding ridges of the ancient Mount Warning.

Climbing up, my camera knocked against something and my lens cap went sailing down into the forest below. What a bummer.

So Gavin and I went down underneath and looked for it, and amazingly after ten minutes or so I found the runaway lens cap nestled in a rotting log. Result!

We retired back to the picnic area where needless to say Nicole embarked upon one of her gourmet barbecues. Rachel contributed a rather tasty potato salad, and all in all it was really tasty. The local birds thought so too and were raiding us for food; the little bastards were very pretty though, brightly colours parrots and suchlike things.

Our second walk of the day was down to Moran's Falls, and we drove down there a little tentatively as we'd noticed the sky was looking a little angry and grim over that way.

Sure enough as we got out of the car and set off, the odd rumble was making itself heard. We thought we'd make it down as far as we could then turn around, but soon the rumbles were getting really ominous and I was re-living the Mount Glorious experience, thinking hmmmm..... steep roads, winding corners, wet conditions....

So I called a halt after about ten minutes of walking and suggested that we might actually like to cut our losses and leg it.

As we were getting back to the car little splotched of rain were starting to fall, but nothing to worry about. To add atmosphere to our journey I opened my window and almost immediately there was a flash of lightning followed a few seconds later by a most excellent crack of thunder.

And then the heavens, as they say, opened.

Torrential is a word that is sometimes loosely used to describe rain that's probably only really heavy. This rain was torrential. Leaves were knocked out of trees by it.... branches were knocked out of trees by it. With windscreen wipers on full blast, we couldn't see where we were going.

We stopped.

After a while the rain started to let up, so we pressed on. A little further down the hill more cars were parked by the side of the road. They must have felt chicken because as we drove past they decided it was safe all of a sudden.... poor fools.

The second pulse of rain was stronger than the first if anything. Boughs of trees were lying in the road, which wasn't so much tarmac down here as a picturesque covering of green leaves. The rain was broken up by the rainforest canopy to become a fine mist, or at least a fine mist vaguely punctuated the torrent that ran down the windscreen like some designer water feature gone mad. The sides of the road here were white; we realised it was hail and started to count our blessings as we tentatively made our way down... if we'd been caught in the hail the car might have looked like it had been involved in a shoot-out...

Further down a tree had fallen over the road, with the base perched on the hillside, allowing us just enough room to drive the car underneath.

The rain let up after a while and the sun came out. Lovely rainbows. Ahhhh.

We stopped for a rest. I needed to relieve myself.

At Canungra we decided to look for a coffee shop. Gavin and I looked at the sky and saw how quickly the clouds were scudding across... and then we heard the thunder.

And so we set off again.

We saw branch lightning hit the ground by Mount Tamborine. Which was nice.

It took us four hours to get home... Eloise was in Nursery for nearly nine hours! Oooops!