I love the early morning. Maybe not when it's raining, with a cold wind blowing, and I have to go to work... but generally I mean. It is the promise of the day to come, when the realities of the day have yet to wear down your intentions to really achieve something for once.

This is indeed why there are so many pre-dawn and sunrise shots in my galleries.

This is McDonald's Fairy Meadow, which runs off the roundabout connecting the north - south highway with the road leading into Wollongong from the escarpment to the west. With the adjacent BP service station, a few light industrial sites and a car yard on the other side of the road, it's the sort of "road stop" location on so many highways in so many parts of the world.

It's a moderately decent place to get a quiet breakfast. Or would be, if they would just get rid of one (ideally both) of the two damn flat screen TVs on the wall which pander to the attention deficit brigade's need for a constant flow of moving colour and sound, or if you can manage to mentally filter one of them out. When I go in at this time of the morning after I've been out shooting they usually have a cartoon series named Dora The Explorer on. According to Wikipedia, "The series centers around a Latina girl named Dora Marquez with a love of embarking on quests ... accompanied by her talking purple backpack and anthropomorphic monkey companion named Boots". You've got a prepubescent strolling off through a jungle with a talking monkey. Seriously? How is this kid not on the local child welfare department's "At Risk Children" register? If she isn't, she should be whether she's a cartoon character or not! Anything, anything to shut her and her damn monkey up ("Yaaaay, we did it!" "Yes Dora, every single episode you and the monkey manage to sodding do it") while I'm trying to enjoy my coffee and write some .Net code on my notebook. (To the extent that one can enjoy Maccas coffee, which is highly variable in quality but sometimes surprisingly good.)

Mind you, after Dora ends the morning "news" shows come on which represent perhaps one of the more comprehensive perversions of the word "journalism". (If you ignore anything that Rupert Murdoch is connected with, where even the term "perversion" is inadequate to describe it.) When Angelina Jolie arriving in Sydney to direct a new fill-um is the headline story (along with where she's expected to stay, how often Brad is expected to visit, interviews with people who were on the same plane and so on), you know that the expression "news program" can only really be used with no small amount of sarcasm and/or irony. Thankfully when the volume is down a bit you can manage to block out the visible signs of the decline of Western civilization.

Still, even when Dora and the "news" presenters are on, the pre-dawn lights add a splash of colour.