Trip to Bungendore

Bungendore is a place I have always wanted to check out, because it has a Wood Works Gallery that features Australian made art pieces made of wood and I love pretty much anything made of wood. For MM though other incentives required and I finally managed to find one, as you probably guessed from the picture here, chestnut! It is chestnut harvest season and there is a farm in Bungendore where you can "pick your own"chestnuts.

The Wood Gallery is even better than I thought. I don't remember how many "Wows" I said all together (partly because the art itself, and the other part is due to their prices though). Even MM was impressed from time to time--his favorite is a cute long-nosed echidna and mine is a singing door bell--it has steel strings with wooden keys, when the key hits the stings the bell sings. I played with it once and of course MM has to do it again...

We has a quite lunch at the Gallery Cafe. It was popular and I had one of the best Mediterranean salads in my life. The trick was in the dressing, it was sweeter than the normal vinegar-olive oil dressing. Perhaps it is honey; I have to try it myself sometimes.

It turned out chestnut picking was not only fun but with a lot of "Ouches". Chestnut shells are so prickly that even gloves could not help sometimes. After a while though we learned the technique of using our feet to get the chestnuts out so that wasn't bad, until I was too tired to remember where I was and sat directly on the ground.

Ouch, ouch, ouch!

I happened to sit on several non-opened shells!

But the more exciting episode was still waiting for me. After about 1.5 hours we finally got a bucket of chestnuts (about 2kgs). On our way out MM found a tree close to the entrance was still full of chestnuts. So our economist immediately formed the theory that everybody, including us had assumed the closer trees were picked already and reached for the ones further away. I thought he has a good point and since we still had some room in our bucket, I started picking, until...

Ouch, ouch, ouch! Ouch, ouch, ouch! Ouch, ouch, ouch!

A snake in the tree!

If you know anything about me, you would know snakes are my least favorite things in the world. Once upon a time I gave my ex boyfriend a heart attach when I suddenly threw away a National Geographic magazine into the air, screaming. All because there was a snake picture in the magazine.

Imagine how would I react when I see a real one. I nearly threw myself back into the grounds, if there weren't any prickly shells...

Well at least our day gets a happy ending. A third of the chestnuts in that bucket were toasted and then MM peeled them, and they taste very good even though I undercooked them a bit. As far as that snake, it was in fact a straw man used for terrifying birds away--it worked on me well. I've informed MM don't worry too much if he hears me screaming in middle of my dream...