Any which way you turn

It may sound like the title of the next Clint Eastwood movie, but it's not. It's autumn and everywhere you look lovely colours are appearing. But first, many thanks to those of you who sent birthday wishes. That Monday was supposed to have been a gloomy day, so we thought we would leave taking a trip in the car until later in the week. So it turned out to be a low-key day. Pressies included a Larousse Illustrated forWouter and a collection of Jaques Brel's 100 most popular songs for me - but of course we both share these things. As we had been painting and tidying for a few days, we knocked off early and got stuck into the wine, seeing we had a good reason to celebrate! (look carefully below)

To continue - we thought we were missing out on autumn colours elsewhere, as in our garden it is like Mother Nature suddenly turned on a switch and everything started changing colour. Leaves have been falling off some of the trees big time. So we took our promised trip around a route which takes you roughly 20-25km radius of Cambieure. To our surprise we found few autumn colours except for the grape vines. However, we did enjoy a break and Cassy managed to get some play and adventure time in, much to his delight.

We found a place just up the road from us where they are selling pick your own apples, and what a pity to see heaps of apples lying on the groundso we will check it out further on the weekend and pick some to eat now and some will go in the freezer for crumbles and pies over the winter. But we have to make another trip or two around the local villages over the coming weeks to make sure we capture all the autumn colours.

After spending a while gathering up leaves on the driveway, what a shock to see it totally covered again the next morning! We love the colours and only raked up the leaves because we were supposed to have some rain. The rain didn't eventuate but a small breeze did which blew more leaves off the trees!

Thanks to Marlana who confirmed the mystery insect (of a previous posting) is indeed a humming-bird moth. Now we have another item to identify, a tree:

It has lovely white scented flowers which have rosy pink bracts. Once the flowers are finished, they produce a dark blue/black berry which sits inside the bract. Please let us know if you have a name for it.

More pics below of autumn colours in our neighbourhood over the last week or two as we've been travelling around. Snow will fall in the next day or two to 1000-800m so we're pretty sure it will become cooler quickly. Having said that, all the things we've planted in the garden seem to be doing well, and we have already been eating the radishes. Most of the grapes have been harvested as have the old sunflowers and maize.