Australian badass

I know it's only been about 5 minutes since my last post, but I can't hold it in.  Here's the deal: I am staying with Morning Glory pioneer pilot/host/friend, curry-cooking, beer-brewing, motorcycle-twirling, mantodea-cultivating, photo-meister Russell White.  Basically a rare strain of Australian badass.  His driveway is--not shaded but maybe--attended by a crowd of tall banana trees. I think I even saw a trichopteran licking the dust off his BMW this afternoon.  That'd be the car, not the bike beside it.  He's the one to thank for my trip to Burketown, as it was he who gave me the only seat in his GROB 109A and let me fly a great deal of the time.  Russell lives in a town called Mullumbimby (I'm not making this up), which I just ran all over a few minutes ago.  To get a good idea of the terrain of Mullumbimby, imagine all of the 150-meter hills you could fit into 50 square kilometers, and then grab that bunch hills around the base and squeeze them together even tighter, and that's basically what Mullumbimby looks like, covered in grass and cows and fern trees and loud frogs and crickets.  And today, smoke.  Bush fires have been making the rounds these past few days further inland, and we inhaled a good dose of it.  So I'm here for a few days grâce à Monsieur White, until the next adventure, which begins with New and ends with Zealand, after a quick trip down south.

photo: another Australian badass. A jillaroo at the Burketown rodeo last weekend.