Queensland, Australia

Flat Jake just finished visiting the home of Leonie Gittins in Queensland. She sent six pictures so far and has more coming. I will post them as soon as I get them.

This is Leonie's story of FJ's visit:

Flat Jake reporting here from Queensland . I have had such a busy day.

First I had a good look around this place - a funny house - it is an A-frame. The bottom floor is for the garage and the sewing room, the next floor up is the kitchen, bathroom lounge room and a couple of bedrooms and there are more bedrooms up on the top floor. You can see the Pacific Ocean from the front verandah. There used to be 5 kids live here but they all grew up. I did get to play with the cat - he has blue eyes and his name is Cami.

Early this morning we did some quilting on a quilt for someone who lost their home in the Victorian bushfires last month. I liked the quilt with crocodiles on it best. Victoria is another state and is about a thousand miles away from here.

Then we went out into the garden and picked some tomatoes and chokos and pumpkins. I played hide and seek in the vines. Chokos are easy to grow here but they don't have much flavour unless you pick them young and put them in a stir fry. Pumpkins make yummy soup and you would not bevieve how good pumpkin scones are. It is pretty warm here all year round and most things grow all the time.

The people in this house have never seen snow falling. Of course it gets pretty hot in summer but only some days as summer is the rainy season. Winter days are beautiful, usually about 25 degrees celcius (you can find out what that is in Farenheight) and the nights rarely go below 10 degrees C. It does get a fair bit colder if you go inland a few more miles, and they get heavy frosts which kill all the gardens.

You can see me in the paw-paw tree and a banana bush but the fruit was not ripe enough to eat.

We had to go about 40 miles to the patchwork shop down at Maroochydore which is at the beach (look for it on a map) I looked at all the fabric and met some ladies having a sewing lesson. Leonie used to work at this shop and she knows all the ladies there.

ON the way to the patchwork shop we called in to the Big Pineapple. It has just been put on the heritage list so it can't ever be pulled down. There are stairs up inside it and you can see people up on the top of it - it is really big. We saw some pineapples in the shop and some more growing outside. Did you see the windmill - did you know they were invented in Australia? The wind blows the sails around and that works a pump which pumps water up from a well in the ground below.

The little train used to take sugar cane to the sugar mill, but now it takes visitors for a ride around the farm.

We saw lots of animals there. The white bird is a sulphur crested cockatoo and he said "hello" to me! The yellow dog is a dingo, a native dog. Farmers don't like them because they kill farm animals and sometime attack children. They never can be fully trained. They don't bark but we heard them howling - a bit scarey.

I was glad all the snakes were in cages - see the snake skin I am sitting on? Snakes shed their skin each year. Some of the most poisonous snakes in the world live in Australia. The lizzards are funny aren't they!

Isn't the wallaby pretty! Wallabies are smaller versions of kangaroos - there are lots of different types. The tawny frogmouth owls looked so sad. They sit perfectly still and are hard to see - they look just like a broken branch. I liked the little chickens best. Here a chicken is a baby, grown up ones are called chooks, or hens and roosters.

It was hot when we finished looking at the animals so we went back up the hill to the restaurant and bought a pineapple sundae - doesn't it look yummy! lots of chopped sweet pineapple, cream and lots of macadamia nut icecream on top. That is Leonie sitting behind it and she ate it all up!

We went down to the beach for a while and saw the lifesavers rescue boat. See the red and yellow flags? You have to swim between them because that is where the lifesavers watch and they choose the safest spot. Lots of visitors get drowned because they don't know about the dangerous rips in the surf and they swim in unsafe areas. Sometimes there are sharks in the waters here and the lifesavers tell everyone to get out of the water fast.

On the way back to Nambour we saw some sugar cane growing near the road. It is about 12 feet high.

We stopped to look at a few houses because they are different here in Queensland. People build them high off the ground so they can check for termites (like millions of little ants) that eat timber houses. Also under the house is a good place to park your car and store stuff. Houses here never have basements. The kitchen and bedrooms are all upstairs. Many houses have big verandahs around them - it is a cool place to sleep when it is hot, a space for little kids to play when it rains and somewhere to have a BBQ and just sit outside and relax.

We shopped in the big Woolworths supermarket - we saw yummy Easter Eggs and some oranges that were grown in America. Oranges are out of season here just now.

After we came home we went to the Kondalilla National Park, just down the road from Leonie's house. We went on a long walk through some tall trees and saw a little waterfall. I sat on a young strangler fig tree - it grows from a seed droped by bird onto another tree where it starts to grow. It's roots reach down to the ground and it eventually strangles the original tree.

The one I am sitting on grew on a dead tree stump. They can get really enormous - and because the original tree dies and rots away they are hollow at the bottom and a man could sleep inside one. We did not see any animals here because they are shy or only come out at night. We did hear lots of birds, including a cat bird. It sounds just like a baby or a cat crying.

I have about 60 photos of me here but I am including only a few to start with.

Well, Grandma Sandi, I think I have seen everything here so I am looking forward to my next holiday - so where do I go next?

love from Flat Jake

Well, Flat Jake.......you're off to Germany!