More about Weather

In November and early December this part of Australia was as hot as Britain was cold, and bushfires were raging across the Eastern States. We've just seen a form reversal with our region being deluged with water and Western Australia now alight. However, things haven't changed much in Europe, with freezing weather and snow much in evidence.

For the record, Armidale has just recorded four successive days of what we call "English Weather". This comprises dreary dull days and persistent light rain. The last four daily totals were: 12mm, 24mm, 35mm, and 12mm for a total of about 83 mm (or nearly 3.5 inches). The last of these was particularly "English" and it didn't stop raining for about 12 consecutive hours.

Compared with places across Northern NSW and Southern Queensland, 83mm was not heavy and the rivers in many locations are in flood, much to the delight of farmers. I wonder if all these weather events can be tracked to the same source - the almost total absence of sun-spots for a large part of 2009.

AS

Gara Gorge

One of the places we treasure the most is Gara Gorge which starts at the Blue Hole - a local swimming spot in Summer - and then descends 250 m (about 750 feet) in a series of waterfalls into a secluded and beautiful valley, which is barely accessible to anyone. This gorge country winds for tens of kilometers as part of the World Heritage Listed Oxley - Wild Rivers National Parks. It is completely uncommercialised and full of wildlife. Two of the pictures show the rugged nature of the countryside.

At the top there are some great walking tracks with ever wider views as one gets farther from the Blue Hole. Along the eastern edge there are historical relics in the form of a flume, which once carried water to Australia's first hydro-electric scheme built in the 1890s to power the nearby town of Hillgrove - site of a gold mining boom at the time. Some of the concrete-sided flume is readily visible in the attached photo.

We walked about 6 km today around one of the walking paths, thankfully in dry, although threatening, weather. It started pouring just after we left the national park! A couple of photos show members of our party walking though steep terrain and at one of the lookouts en route. We couldn't help pulling faces at the latter having just had the scary experience of stepping over a large black (or tiger) snake. Perhaps I should say that Greg had that encounter and I was close behind. Max ran up to have a look, but was restrained!

AS

Geocaching

One of the things I like doing is finding geocaches. These are containers hidden in the landscape, city or country, and identified by their latitude and longitude. Armed with their GPS devices, millions of people globally hunt for perhaps a million of these caches located just about anywhere. I've planted two of them in the Armidale district and Greg, who is an ardent cahce finder is staying with us for Xmas. Naturally we've been out tracking down mine and a varietu of others despite awful weather. It's not so much cold and wet as prone to very heavy monsoonal showers! Our present climate resembles the hills of Assam and if it continues like it has over the Christmas period we're going to drown - despite being on a hillside 1000m up!

Anyway, we've visited six in the last two days at some nice spots. The accompanying pictures show (1) the Gara Gorge (one of my caches); (2) the Thomas Lagoon (an inland drainage area near us); (3) the cache site at the Armidale Arboretum; and (4) a termite mound with some seekers in the Armidale pine forest. We had great fun finding them and logging our visits both at the cache sites and on the web home page. I've found about 40 that are logged and Greg has found five times that number!

AS

Christmas Lights

All across Australia, the owners of many homes decorate them with lights and other decorations. Armidale, for example, has an annual competition (prize funded by the local electricity retailer) and the list of winners is published - along with their locations.

Tonight, we piled several of us into a car, along with Max in the child seat, to take the light trail around town. Many of the displays were impressive and not just for the thousands of coloured lights they contained. The best had images of Santa, sleighs, reindeer, and so on, some of which had moving parts or programmed changes to the light displays.

The sort of thing I mean is shown in the attached pictures.

AS

Christmas Dinner

There were 8 of us for dinner today. It was not the usual northern hemisphere event because we did not have a hot meal - just salads and cold meat, plus fruit salad to end with. I might add that the dessert came 5 hours after the main meal! Unlike the traditional dinner we also downed almost 2 kg of cooked prawns, each of which had to be shelled, beheaded and de-tailed before eating, which was a great chore.

As a nice touch, Emily supplied home-made Xmas crackers. These had much better jokes than the commercial variety, each tailored to the individual guests, and more useful presents. I, for example received a book of Soduku puzzles. And we avoided the silly headware usually contained in crackers!






The pictures show the table and the individual crackers Emily made.

AS

Water Pistols at 10 Paces

It's Christmas Day here and nice and warm (30C). Four of us received water pistols as presents - Greg, Rob, Max and me. This, I might add, was pre-arranged.

Just after Xmas dinner, three of us - excluding Rob - donned board shorts and otherwise stripped off for a classic duel with water pistols. We all finished absolutely soaked, but it was great fun for an hour or so. Emily even joined in towards the end, but she and I were handicapped by having smaller capacity pistols. So we had to keep on refilling our machines to remain in the fight, which was a chore.

The picture shows Greg and Max facing off just before lunch. They only got a little wet in the process and the afternoon fight was much more serious.

AS

Another Devilish View

A friend of mine has just emailed these pictures of yesterday's bridge game! The attendance was massive - 18 tables and I had the foresight to deal two ikdentical sets of boards so that I could run two movements, but score a cross the field.





AS

A Devil of a Party

Yesterday the Armidale Bridge Club held its final Saturday pairs tournament for 2009 and I agreed to organise and direct the event, which was to be followed at 5.00 by the annual Christmas party. I developed the theme of 'wicked deals' in which I confronted the players with some wild hands culled from a variety of books and articles. I also rotated the deals (from N-S to E-W and vice versa) to even up the balance of the high card points and make more of a competition.



Anyway the players were ecstatic about the challenges and opportunities they found and I can see demand for a similar event next year. Because the play was so complex, the players made a lot of mistakes contravening the laws of the game and I was run around the room attending calls for the director. That was only part of the difficulty. I also had to judge the indiscretions in bidding and play for my 'wicked awards'. You know the sort of thing - a prize for the worst result; the self immolation prize; the prize for the loudest laugh! Luckily my friend Bruce Tier did the scoring, otherwise everyone would have left for home long before the scores cam out!

I had the brainwave of dressing up as director of the wicked tournament and awards. As you can see from the picture, I donned horns and a cloak for the purpose, not to mention a long forked tail, all worn over some board shorts - the kind of attire one would expect from Satan's Australian representative. There was a roar of approval when I entered the room to start the tournament! Fortunately. I did not have to go to a theatrical costumier for the outfit. Dot had another brainwave and discovered the required item lying in Emily's bedroom. Presumably she went to a fancy dress ball at some stage!

AS

Long Distance Commute

Dot thinks I'm mad, with perhaps good reason. I travelled to a 2.5 hour meeting today and guess the round trip distance and the whole trip took 10 hours. Was the distance 200km, 400km, 600km, or perhaps 800 km?

I've forgotten to mention that I went by air and the return distance was closer to 1800 km involving 4 separate flights. The journey was to Canberra via Sydney! Moreover, the journey was so fast that I missed seeing Beck and Max completely and saw Emily for about 30 seconds. That was a chance meeting in the entrance to the Department of Education and Employment and Workplace Relations. They employ her and my contact was in the same building!!

Was I mad to go that distance for a 2.5 hour meeting? Perhaps I should add that the meeting was successful, though I'll keep the subject matter under wraps for now.

Meanwhile, the flight was incredibly bumpy through massive cloud formations and it has now started to pour in Armidale.

AS

After the Smoke

The last post reported great heat and smoke from bush fires. Now we have almost the opposite. Would believe almost 40 mm of rain (1.5 inches) in 20 minutes and a plunge in temperatures from about 27c to 15c in a few minutes? The garden was afloat for a while!

I'm not attaching a picture because most of mt readers are intelligent enough to know what it looks like. I went on to the bureau of meteorology website and saw a massive storm cell about 50 km (30 miles) across which went right over the top of the city. Alas, there was some damage. Part of the roof of one of our shopping centres, Armidale Plaza, collapsed, closing the centre. That's terrible for the traders who are entering their busiest period in the year.

Anyway, it's back to normal today. The forecast is for about 28C and it's now brilliantly sunny.

AS

Smoke Haze

Armidale has had the strangest start to summer I've ever experienced. Day after day has been hot, with temperatures in the 32-24 C range (about 90 to 94 F). All the hot weather has dried off the vegetation west of here, although Armidale is still green. Unfortunately, lightening strikes about 100 km from here started some major bush fires and, although we're in no danger, the roaring fires, aided by strong westerly winds, have driven masses of smoke over our city and created red-brown skies as the attached pictures show.

It will only clear when the winds turn southeasterly as they should be at this time of year. That brings coller and damper weather capable of dousing the fires. And we badly need rain to remove the dust from the atmosphere. It's not causing us harm, but some people may be hospitalised. The nearest thing to current conditions I can remember is the great London smogs of the 1950s and 60s.

AS

Tranquil Bellingen

On the way home today, the route took us up the Bellinger valley through the little town of Bellingen. The Waterfall Way (the name of the road) has indeed many spectacular waterfalls, some among the highest in the Southern Hemisphere, but the Bellinger River is peaceful and picturesque in the lower reaches - as shown in the accompanying picture. As the road drives inland, the scenery gets wilder and wilder as it climbs firstly to the Dorrigo Plateau and then towards Point Lookout (1,600 metres) near Ebor. It is for us one of the most attractive roads in the whole of Australia, and our mother compared on stretch near Dorrigo to the Swiss Jura mountains when she visited. The whole area has been drenched by heavy rains throughout 2009 and it reminded me of parts of Ireland I visited last year.

Anyway, back to Bellingen, which is a 130 year old timber cutting town now turned into a simultaneously up-market hideaway for the rich and famous (film & TV stars for example)and downmarket hideaway for alternative lifestyle seekers interested in arts and crafts or less legal pursuits. It's a good place to eat out and shop - as we often do when passing through. One picture shows we three seated at a coffee shop awaiting bagels and drinks (like Chai Latte, which I've found to be very pleasant).

The main street has lots of period shops, most of which have gone upmarket in pursuit of dollars. The Commercial Emporium used to sell what's advertised on the building - it was a general store. However, it's now an expensive boutique - as Dot and Judy found when rummaging through the merchandise. I suppose its a cross between most Australian vernacular shopping architecture and the US wild west where I've seen similar streetscapes.

AS

Wild Seas

Whilst in Sawtell, a southerly buster sped through dropping the temperatures from about 36C to just 22C. For British readers, this means a cold front ripped through bringing strong winds and rain (mainly overnight). And the wind turned from the north to the south (the direction of Antarctica).

Yesterday (Tuesday 1 December), the strong winds led to a 2-3 metre swell and we walked along the beach to the nearby headland to see the waves crashing over the rocks. It was very picturesque, as the accompanying pictures show. We could have watched scene for hours!

AS

Brush Turkeys

The most recent post showed the view from our cabin. Later on we discovered some company in the form of Brush Turkeys which inhabit the slopes down to the lagoon and the ocean beaches. I guess the specimens pictured look something like a turkey, but unlike our American cousins who hunted them for the table on Thanksgiving Day, we left them alone.

AS

A Sawtell Interlude

We've just been down to the coast for four days - me Dot and Judy. Judy won first prize in a raffle many months ago - several nights in a caravan park at Sawtell staying in one of their 'villas'. If that conjures up images of a villa in Tuscany, you're wrong. It was an up-market cabin, but actually very nice provided one ignores the air conditioning failing on a day when the temperature reached 36 C. Anyway, we all needed some R & R and sitting atop some of the best coastal scenery in NSW was a good location. Even the weather stayed mostly fine, though hot on the first day. And anyway, we didn't spend long in the villa because there were lots of beach walks, not to mention attractions in the nearby towns of Coffs Harbour and Sawtell.

The caravan park, it was a relief to find, was spacious and green with lots of trees and even two croquet courts. The attached photos show the view from our 'villa' and the beautiful panoramas from adjacent beaches north to Mutton Bird Island and south towards Scotts Head and Southwest Rocks. Mutton birds (which used to be eaten - hence the name) still inhabit the island, but they're safe now because it is part of the local Marine Park.

AS