David and Enid's Travels

It cooled nicely overnight so we had a very restful sleep.  This morning we awoke and helped Conrad truss his tomatoes, before the heat of the day got too bad.  We also pulled a lot of weeds and bagged them so they can’t seed off.  After that Enid washed some clothes, and no sooner had we started hanging them on the line than it started to rain.  It has stopped now, so they should dry quickly as the sun is out.

I watched the cricket game between England and Australi for awhile, but when they  broke the game for lunch we switched over and watched the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht race.  We also were able to phone Graeme and Geoffrey as it is now Christmas Day in Canada.

Kookaburra, Christmas Day

It was probably the warmest Christmas Enid and I have ever experienced.  Conrad’s thermometer showed it reached a high of 37 C yesterday.  We celebrated it in Araluen with the Kindrachuk family, and had a great time – turkey and ham, freshly baked vegetables, and a pavlova for dessert.  I have to admit that a pavlova is a great dessert to have in a hot climate, and it was delicious with fresh fruit like strawberries, blueberries, and passion fruit..

Before dinner Enid and I went for a bushwalk up the mountain behind the farm, where we saw this kookaburra.  We followed the creekbed back until it climbed over a hill.  When we reached the top, a good climb in the heat of the day, we followed the fireroad back down.  It seemed the quintessentially Australian experience to walk through the open eucalyptus forest in the heat, and see some of the Australian birds.  We’ve generally gone outdoors in Canada on Christmas Day as well, but usually to go cross country skiing.

In the afternoon Conrad played the “Saskatchewan: The Four Seasons” DVD we’d given them for Christmas.  He thoroughly enjoyed it.  In the evening we watched the television broadcast of carol singing in Sydney.  It was very nice to have their family around when we are so far away from ours this year.

Christmas bells

On Wednesday morning we went to the Australian National Botanical Gardens in Canberra.  The gardens have a large collection of native Australian plants, so they were quite interesting.  It was warm enough that the smell of eucalyptus was quite strong.  I imagine Australians don’t really notice the smell, but we find it quite strong, not unpleasant, but just a rather different aroma.

After lunch we drove to the farm at Araluen.  The drive down the mountain is steep and winding, but at one spot there is a spectacular view out over the valley below.  We are parked in the yard, and having a good time to visit with Carol and Con Kindrachuk.

This morning, Thursday, we helped pick beans, parsley and basil which will be sold tomorrow in Braidwood, the nearest town.  It is a very nice day, sunny but not hot with a nice cool breeze.  We’ll be here for a few days over the Chrismas/Boxing day weekend.

Flagpole on Parliament, Canberra

It didn’t rain today, there was some sun, and it wasn’t too cold so it was a much nicer day.  This morning we went to the Australian Parliament.  We had a tour that lasted about an hour.  It was interesting to compare the differences in they Australian and Canadian federal governments.  One of the most obvious differences is how new their Parliament Building is.  It was opened in 1988.  The building itself is shaped like two boomerangs, and is topped by a massive stainless steel flagpole with that same shape.  You can walk out onto the roof, and from there you have a great view out over the city of Canberra.

After lunch we went to the Australian War Memorial.  The drive to the memorial, Anzac Parade, contains many sculptures and monuments.  The memorial itself is a very large museum.  We spent s couple of hours in the building looking at the exhibits, which are very impressive.  They give a good depiction of Australia’s role in the history of the last 100 years.

Sculpture at Australian Institute of Sport

This morning after we’d restocked our groceries we went to the Australian Institue of Sport.  This is the elite athlete training centre for Australia, and it is impressive.  They bring their athlete teams here for training.  The facilities are excellent, for example the volleyball court is the one used at the Sydney Olympics (they moved it here to Canberra).  The track and field facility is a mondo track, and would put our best competition facilities in Canada to shame.  The pool is new and state of the art with extensive video cameras, underwater viewing ports, and platforms to monitor the athletes pressure and angle of their feet on the start.  They have a dietitian assigned to each sport.  It is relatively easy to see why Australia has done so much better than Canada at the Olympic level, given that we basically started from the same point in 1976 at the Montreal Olympics where neither country won any gold medals.

It isn’t very nice weather though, as it is still cloudy, cool and windy.  All the Australians are complaining about how cold and wet it is.

Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra

We had a great time at the meal last night.  It was very nice to finally meet some of the people that we have been corresponding with for so long about our Australian trip and put faces to the names.

This morning was clear, cool and sunny and we went to the market.  We spent a couple of hours visiting many of the stalls, and managed to buy a couple of nice souvenirs of our trip.  Then we walked along the lake in central Canberra towards the national art gallery, where we ate our lunch in the sculpture garden.  There were many black swans swimming along the shore where children were feeding them bread.  After that we toured around the gallery mostly looking at the Aboriginal art collection for a couple of hours.

We were surprised to see that it was raining out when Peter came and picked us up.  We came back to our motorhome which is parked in their front yard and it continued to rain for much of the afternoon.  It is quite cool, so we have the heat on inside.

Lake George Wind Turbines

It was another cool and very windy night.  I commented to Enid that the wind howling around the motorhome sounded like a prairie winter storm.  It wasn’t that cold of course, but it was very cloudy and cool when we left Katoomba. 

We drove south to Canberra, and there was a very strong wind all day.  It was mostly a cross wind so it blew the motorhome around.  At about noon we had another torrential downpour from a thunderstorm.  The road is very good, the best highway we’ve been on for the entire trip.  It’s a four lane or better road all the way once you reach the first motorway at Penrith on the way into Sydney.  Along the way there was a large mostly dry lake (Lake George).  On the east side ridge of the lake are a large number of wind turbines.  They would have been generating a lot of electricity today.

We got to Peter and Margot’s in mid-afternoon, and took the opportunity to defrost our refrigerator.  It needed it as the freezer compartment was heavily coated with frost.  We are going out for Christmas supper with the Kindrachuk family tonight.

Black and orange butterfly

We walked around the Blue Mountains viewpoints this morning.  It was quite foggy when we started, but later in the morning the fog lifted some and so the views improved.  It was cool, enough so that we slept under one of our sleeping bags last night, and wore long pants when we hiked today.  There aren’t a great deal of tourists around, probably because it’s not very warm.  We did see lots of Europeans (judging from the language, mostly Germans) who seem to come here and use campervans, and lots of tour groups of Japanese (who seem to travel in tour busses in large groups).  There are only a very few I can identify as having a North American accent.

There are quite a number of butterflies about, nothing large, but some quite colorful.  They don’t sit still, but flit about in the air, rarely landing on anything, so it is hard to photograph them.

This afternoon has been quite windy, and though the clouds are starting to move away in the east, it is still quite cloudy elsewhere.  I edited pictures for much of the afternoon, so have posted quite a few on the website www.digipac.ca/pictures.

Tomorrow we will be going to Canberra to meet the Kindrachuks and Halladays extended families for supper.  After a few days in Canberra we will be going to the farm at Araluen for Christmas.

Mount Tomah Botanic Gardens

The rest of the Putty Road was not nearly as twisty as we drove south to Windsor. We headed west from there toward the Blue Mountains, stopping at a service station to fill with diesel, and after that to read our email. We were surprised to find a flood of emails indicating that our furnace had quit in our house. Fortunately it was repaired by the end of the day, and not too much damage appears to have been done, only one kitchen pipe froze.

We stopped for lunch at the Mount Tomah Botanic Garden, which is at an altitude of about 1000 m. Here they have a lot of temperate plants that won’t grow well in the hotter temperature of Sydney. We spent about two hours looking at flowers. After looking at much of the main part of the gardens we went on a walk through the temperate rain forest, a mostly old growth wild area that was saved from logging years ago. As we neared the end of this walk it just started to rain, and we didn’t have the umbrella with us, so we hurried back to the motorhome. Just as we got there it started to pour, and so we decided to leave. As we did so it started to hail. We didn’t get much hail, but the news tonight showed that there was a major hail storm in parts of Sydney this afternoon.

We drove on to Blackheath where we stopped at an information centre, and also went and looked at Govetts Leap (“leap” is apparently a Scottish word meaning “waterfall”) also known as Bridal Veil falls. There are quite spectacular views out over the Grose Valley. If it had been sunny, not raining, doubtless the views would have been much better. We tried to take a short hike to one of the lower viewpoints, but it was raining too much, and the trail was in terrible shape so we just turned back.

The Three Sisters

We stopped at the Katoomba Falls Caravan Park. From here there is a trail which starts just across the road. We walked on it for somewhat over an hour. It’s very steep, and consists mostly of steps carved into the rock. We didn’t go all the way to the bottom as it looked like it was going to rain again. We did however get to the viewpoints that showed the very tall Katoomba Falls, and The Three Sisters, which are an icon of The Blue Mountains. It was a steep climb back up.

Kangaroos at Apsley Gorge campground

It was cold during the night.  Just before midnight we awoke, put our socks on, and covered ourselves with our fleece jackets.  It’s the first time that we’ve been that cold since we got here.

I awoke fairly early this morning and went out to take some pictures.  I hoped to spot the rosellas we’d seen on the drive up yesterday, and I did find some, but didn’t get very good pictures.  Parrots are hard to photograph.  They seem very wary of humans, and the trees here are so high that they spend most of the time in the tops of the branches.  I also wanted to see if I could find some more kangaroos, and did, but the best pictures I got were right in our campsite.  Enid saw a mother with the joey sticking its head out of the pouch, but by the time she got her camera it had gone too far away to get a picture.

It was a great day when we left the campsite this morning.  The sky was cloudless, and was like that for most of the day.  The country is very beautiful, high rolling hills and green grassy fields.  There were some cattle and sheep in the fields, though for the most part they looked very empty.  Probably in normal years that aren’t as wet as this has been they have to move their cattle about to prevent overgrazing.

Fields along the Oxley Highway west of Apsley Gorge

The town of Tamworth hosts a huge rodeo, and there were big show barns along the highway.  They also claim to be the country music capital of Australia.  From there we drove south along highway 15, the New England Highway, which is a pretty good road, but much less busy than the Pacific Highway.  All along the road we were travelling through good agricultural areas, and the views were impressive.  In some ways it reminded me of the foothills west of Calgary, except that the trees are eucalyptus, not spruce.  The town of Scone has many horse farms, and many, many wooden fences.

After lunch we drove on to Singleton.  We missed the turn off onto highway 69.  There was a sign, but it indicated towns to the east towards the ocean.  We kept on straight ahead, but by the time we were a couple of kilometers out of town it was obvious that we were not heading in the right direction.  I pulled off the road right behind a highway truck, and we asked one of the workmen where to go.  He said that it was pretty dumb that the sign doesn’t also point out that the road goes in the other direction, but he also told us how to get back to the correct road, “the Putty Road”.

There are many very large open pit coal mines through the Singleton area, as well as at least two very large coal fired generating stations.   Just after getting on to the Putty road we had to take a detour for highway work, and the detour went right beside one of the open pit mines.  It was huge, as were the truck hauling the ore.  It obviously is also upsetting to the people in this area, as there are many signs saying “Stop pit mining” and “We support underground mining.”

The Putty Road is very narrow and even more twisted than the road we were on yesterday.  However there doesn’t seem to be a lot of traffic.  We are camped tonight in a free site, “Boggy Swamp Creek”.  The creek may be boggy, but the site itself is small and not bad.  It’s right close to the road, but the traffic is light.  There is no one else here, perhaps not surprisingly as there are also no washrooms.  You’d have to be self-sufficient as we are.  Most of the small camper vans we see would not want to stay here.