Australia trip 4

November 20th. I snorkeled twice this morning, from Taka. I had thought I would do a “discovery dive” with an instructor, the second time. In the end, though, I snorkeled. I have seen LOTS of fish. Potato cod, trumpet fish, parrot fish, clown fish, red snapper, butterflyfish, shark, giant clam, nurse shark, bannerfish. I swam with Nick, then with Matt. At the end of the cod feed, Hiro brought the feed box up so the potato cod came nearly to surface, where I could see it. Yea! Now I am sunbathing. None of us should be sunbathing, of course. Bad for the skin.

Afternoon snorkeling was shorter, the Lighthouse Bommie, south of where we were in the morning. I saw a sea turtle! It was a hawksbill turtle. First I saw it gliding along the edge of the bommie. Then I cleared my goggles, and it was beginning to rise closer to me. I saw it surface a couple of times before swimming away from me. I practiced diving while snorkeling. I’m really bad at it, but it was fun. Snorkeling here while others scuba’d, was like playing in the bathtub instead of swimming.

I saw Nemo, 2 Nemos, early on, but then they disappeared. I saw a large school of narrow, silver-white fish with narrow orange stripes along the dorsal ridge (2 or 3). I saw another large school of yellowtail fusilliers, blue fish whose yellow tails resembled less-than or greater-than signs. After we were done at Lighthouse Bommie, the guests watched the crew put the dive ladders away. We saw a young hawksbill turtle and an olive sea snake surface next to our boat. Wahoo!

photos from australia trip 3

Australia trip 3

Wednesday, November 17th. Today began with rain, like Monday did. We had arranged to go on a guided hike, but the tour guide was late picking us up. When he arrived, he assured us that, by the time we got to the trail head, the weather would clear. It did. Yea! We had a 3-4 hour hike in and out of the Grand Canyon in Australia’s Blue Mountains. John, with Wildframe, was a terrific tour guide. His area of study is biology, and his hobby is raising orchids, plus he takes tour groups through this canyon more than once a week. He knows about most of the plants and animals there, and is humble enough to say “I don’t know” when confronted with a new species. Truly, the difference between taking the train to the summit and hiking on our own, and using John, was that John drove us from the hostel, he shared greatly of his knowledge of the area, and he was friendly and kind.

There are several canyons that all seem to meet in the middle, and there is an area where mountains give way to table lands. We walked down below the cliffs, which were at about 3,000 feet. I don’t know how deep this Grand Canyon is, but it took us about 2 and a half hours to walk to the bottom of it, stopping frequently to ask questions and take pictures. I wish I could show a picture of one of the orange crawfish we saw. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get close enough to get a good picture. We learned the difference in the appearance of the tree fern and the king fern. We learned what iron stone is. We found out that where iron stone forms a layer between layers of sandstone, sometimes a swamp forms above, and then beautiful waterfalls appear below. We saw lots and lots of eucalyptus trees, different kinds, and we learned about how eucalyptus responds to forest fires. We saw different kinds of acacia, and also banxia. We saw parrots and cockatoos, and carrawongs, and Australian crows--which sounded just like cats.

Thursday evening, November 18th. We’re at the Cairns Central YHA, waiting for Pizza Hut to arrive with 30 pizzas. It’s $5 pizza night! Lots of hungry young men and women’s hopes for an early dinner were dashed when the receptionist announced that Pizza Hut was one hour behind schedule. 30 pizzas!

Tomorrow, at 5pm, we will leave for Cod Hole and the Coral Sea (Osprey Reef). Brad will scuba dive, and I will snorkel or laze about on the boat. We’ll be gone until Tuesday at 2:30pm, and we probably won’t have internet access. Have a lovely weekend!

Australia trip 2

Tuesday, Nov. 16th. We went to Watson’s Bay, and also bought touristy stuff. The ferry trip was a highlight. Our hats almost blew off. There is a cliff at Watson’s Bay, Camp Cove, where you can see the Pacific Ocean. It’s historic significance is first as the place where people would watch for ships, and then as a fortification. Now it is a national park. The cliffs are beautiful, the drop looks huge. Lots of plants I hadn’t seen before. There were signs that people are planting young plants in areas where there is only dirt now. Maybe young native plants.

I don’t know if we really bought aboriginal art gifts, but they were advertised that way. I liked the quilting squares and the coasters. I did not like the kangaroo scrotum pouches.

We keep over-eating. It’s hard when the portions are big and the menu is tempting. Today was pancakes and eggs, then fish and chips. The price of the fish and chips was astronomical-40 AUD!!!!

The hostel offered $5 burgers for dinner, so we had those and met some of our fellow travelers. Now we are doing laundry and drinking sparkling shiraz. Tomorrow we have a guided hike in the Blue Mountains. Thursday we probably check out on time (10am) and then leave for Cairns in the afternoon.

Australia Trip, Part 1

It’s five a.m. and I”m awake. Brad is trying to sleep. I went to sleep sometime after 7pm. I woke up at 9:45, 3 and 4. I’m fine. It’s just an adjustment to be in a time zone so far from home.

I got into the Sydney intl airport at about 8am yesterday, local time of course. Brad waited outside the security area while I was asked about foreign plants, controlled substances, and so on. I have a new stamp in my passport now. Yea!! I’ll have to look at that sometime. When Brad got me, we took the train to Central Station, near Sydney Harbour. The train had cars where some sections were double-decker. More coolness! We got off at Central, and walked to Cumberland Street, where the Sydney Harbour-the Rocks YHA youth hostel is located. I love it here. Although the room has no shampoo or tv, it has everything else. It’s quite similar to rooms I had in Finland hotels.

I took a shower, rested, then we headed out. It began to rain and rained until I fell asleep in the evening. We ate silly food yesterday. I had pancakes for lunch, and Brad had eggs benedict. At dinnertime, Brad had a dark chocolate milkshake while I had a Belgian waffle with dark chocolate-dipped fruit.

We shopped. There’s a bookstore near here with a selection of books that I like. I’d like to have the entire collection transported to my home. Then I could weed out the titles I don’t care for, later. Somebody at this store likes the Penguin publishing company a lot. There were two different Penguin series available. This was how I learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It may be simply that because Penguin is British, there's more traffic in Penguin books here. Back home, I live near a distribution point for Random House, and there is a large percentage of Random House books in our local bookstores.

I found a brown, broad-brimmed hat that I like. The humidity here means that, when I wear the hat, my hair makes a kind of half-sphere under the hat. Not really, but I do have very puffy hair in this weather. It’s like Baltimore in May or June.

It’s late spring here. There seems to be a lot of wisteria in Sydney, including a dark purple kind that is new to me. There are conifers and palms growing side by side. Brad and I walked to the Botanic Gardens. This collection has a lot of plants from other parts of the world, and I wasn’t always able to tell which ones were from where. We stopped to smell many roses. There was also a giant honeysuckle. The birds we saw were fun surprises. There are magpies here, which I have also seen in my home state of Washington, and in Finland. We also saw something like an ibis, and a smaller bird whose habits reminded me of a killdeer, except that it didn’t walk on the ground much. There were pigeons, and some kind of local gull. Also a duck that looked a lot like a Mallard, but wasn’t one.

Birds

I saw a swallow in Finland that I hadn't seen before. It is called a barn swallow, or Haapäärasky. I will show photos of a Haapäärasky and of a North American barn swallow. Here is Maryland, we sometimes see barn swallows, as well as Purple Martins, Tree Swallows and Bank Swallows. I'm not sure, but I think our local barn swallows are the most common where I live. The local barn swallows have a buff-colored breast, blue wings, and rust-colored areas on the throat and head.

Trip to FInland, 4

Food

I loved the food I ate in Finland. From the coffee to the fish soup. Especially the fish soup. There were so many kinds of rye bread, too. One for every town, it seemed. Then there were Tarja's pastries, yeasted sweet rolls, and Wille's enormous pancakes. I liked the sausage, the cheese, but especially the potatoes. Those potatoes were delicious, every last one of them. Boy, what potatoes!

I had fun seeing how people made their coffee. Most often, I saw the yellow coffeemaker at Ilpo and Merja's summer house. It looked a lot like my coffeemaker at home, except it was yellow and prettier. Then there was Elsa Bergmann's percolator. I had never made coffee in a percolator before, believe it or not. Freshly prepared percolator coffee is just fine, quite tasty. The Moccamaster coffeemakers were funny, two-part affairs that looked like they sat on a two-burner hotplate. I liked them all, and all the coffee they made. What fun! At home, Brad and I have tried making coffee many different ways, over the years. It's always fun to try a new coffee gadget.

Now that I'm home, I want to find recipes for rye flatbreads. I want to make that fish soup, probably with salmon. I want, need to find a recipe for the shaved beef with gravy. And I have promised myself to choose my potatoes more carefully.

Here in Maryland, I often try to buy local food. In Finland, I didn't worry about that. And I know that the Finnish tomatoes I ate came from greenhouses. I might not eat a greenhouse tomato at home. In Finland, I ate grapes from Egypt. I think it would have been wonderful to have some wild Finnish blueberries, if I'd been there in late July (or August?), but the grapes were good too. I certainly ate some local bread and fish, and other foods too. I didn't talk to people about what a local-food diet might be, but the food I ate was wholesome and tasty. Here, have a strawberry, or maybe a potato. And please, pass that salmon over my way.

Trip to Finland, 3

Ilpo and Merja's summer property is very, very pretty. I spent an afternoon with his father, Angervo, walking through the garden. Angervo told me the Finnish names of the flowers. Much of the time all we could do was giggle and shrug at each other, but it was fun. In Finland, in early July, this is what I saw blooming: daylilies, roses, California poppies, lupins, and strawberries. The peonies had buds but no flowers yet. I did not see ants on the peonies there the way we do in Maryland. There were lots of mosquitoes, just like people said there would be. We were okay though. Lots of Off! was used, roll-on for bare skin, spray for clothes. I liked walking around Tornio and seeing the light in the sky. I could imagine that a painter would really enjoy being that far north in the summertime, to try and catch the light. I could watch the river all day. The river was always different, and always at the end of the path through the grass.

Trip to Finland, 2

I'd like to write a bit more about the night train. I really enjoyed myself on the train. For me, the train represents travel without having to drive, or having to think about driving. In Finland, taking the night train meant I could travel for 10 and a half hours without driving, and while getting some sleep. I would like to do that again on another trip. It was convenient, and I liked seeing the "railroad" side of the towns we passed through when I was awake.

Much of Finland is flat, and there are a great many trees there; I saw a lot of fir and birch. There were lots and lots of rivers and lakes.

Small note about Avis Car Rental in Kemi. Use them. Oskar brought our rental car to the train station for us, and waited at the end of the platform so he could wave at us when we arrived.

Trip to Finland, 1

We left on June 30th. June 29th was the day Jerry and Rosemary arrived from Montana. On the 30th, we flew from Washington Dulles, all the way to Charles de Gaulle. The flight was 8 hours long, but filled with movies, tv shows, excellent food, free wine, blankets and pillows. At CDG, we had to run the gauntlet on our way to the Finnair flight we had to catch. We went through passport control and also a security checkpoint. Dad and Patti were on the flight to Helsinki. They barely made it with only an hour layover at CDG. Finnair food is not good. Don't bother with it. Nice staff though. When I started seeing tiny islands off Helsinki, with wee sailboats floating nearby, I felt like Fantasy Island couldn't be far.

I'd like to spend more time in Helsinki at some point. We had an afternoon, between about 3pm and 10pm, when we could stroll, buy train tickets (thanks, Dad!), accidentally run into cousin Elaine, and just generally wish that we could take an earlier train. We had reservations for sleeping compartments on the 22:23 thanks to Reijo, but it was a long time to wait for it. I slept well on the train, and I enjoyed the novelty of it, but not everyone was happy. J and R had somebody knocking on their door all night. Kemi station came at 9 o'clock in the morning on July 2nd, and we were surprised to see, not just Oskar from Avis car rental, but also Ilpo, Tarja and Reijo. Hurray! We moved into Ilpo and Merja's summer house, and proceeded to be amazed by the ever-present sunshine. We never seemed to know what time it was, while we were in the Tornio valley.

New projects done, thanks to the snow storm

We had snowmaggedon, or snowpocalypse, or snowmantua, or snowsomething. In any case, it allowed me to make two batches of bread, and it allowed my mother and me to get some sewing and knitting projects done. Mom did practically all the knitting, I did some sewing. I have a knitting project of my own, a dishcloth, which is not done yet. There will be more pictures soon. I just haven't taken them yet. By the way, has anyone seen my camera? Here is a picture of Eleanor in her new nightgown.

At last, another craft project done

I finished Eleanor's nightgown yesterday, with lots of help from my mother. I have a picture of the nightgown on my phone, so I'll put that up later. Eleanor doesn't like having her picture taken, so we'll have to make it fun somehow, maybe by taking a picture of her with her sister.

Diamonds Turned to Rain

Last night we had some precipitation, and I was excited because it looked like diamonds had rained down on our deck. This morning, some were still there, but now they're melting and joining today's rain. Bleah.

Today is another day to work on E's flannel nightgown. Long ago, in October, I bought fabric for two Christmas nightgowns. Now it's late January, and one of the two gowns was completed last week. I'm late. Here is a picture of the first one, for P.