Beautiful New England

January is almost over and Max heads home to Canberra tomorrow, via Sydney. We haven't travelled the region as much as we hoped because of the wet and stormy weather over the last two weeks or so, which dumped almost 120 mm of rain (or almost 5 inches).

However, yesterday's weather was glorious and we headed east to Wollomombi Falls to see the work of all the rain - hopefully a mass of water plunging over the falls. And so it proved. Here's Max and me at the main viewing platform and the view that we saw. Wollomombi falls are on the left and Chandler falls are on the right, with both merging at the foot of the gorge way below. Max is proudly wearing one of his two Nerf guns together with a new gift from us of a shoulder strap and bullet cartridges (!) The bullets are made of soft foam and are not supposed to damage objects or people targeted. He was under strict instructions not to fire in a National Park and he knows how to treat animals well. The area you see is more of the World Heritage Listed Oxley - Wild Rivers National Park shown in a recent post.

Since it was a clear day with relatively low humidity we had brilliant views over the surrounding countryside out to Round Mountain in the distance shown in the next rather grainy picture. The range you see marks the edge of the New England plateau, which plunges in an escarpment to the coastal plains beyond. Round Mountain is 1586 m  high (c. 5150 feet). So the tablelands actually rise about 600 m (or nearly 2000 feet) as one travels east towards the coast from Armidale.

The Wollomombi river itself travels through a deep gorge (shown above) on its way to join the Macleay River and on to the Pacific Ocean near Kempsey. It's possible to walk along the bottom of the gorge and there are signposted tracks to take you there, but it's a long steep climb coming back and I've only done the journey about 3 times.

AS

Cyclone?

Yesterday was a good day to go to the opera. To start with, the weather was awful - unrelenting rain and cool temperatures. And things are getting worse. Topical cyclone 'Oswald' (yes, they all have names) formed in the Coral Sea a week or so ago and subsequently moved south along the Queensland Coast and into Northern NSW. It wasn't a big storm like the one that hit New York last year, but it has been very persistent  in both its track and damaging rainfall. Much of SE Queensland has had devastating floods along with a rare series of tornadoes.

Our turn arrived on Saturday afternoon when light falls of rain started and now, about 40 hours later, it is still raining and the forecasts have this continuing for another 24 hours.Interestingly, the eye of the former cyclone passed over Armidale at about 6 am this morning and the rain abated at the centre. Now it is pouring again and the winds, though not storm force, are picking up. However, the rain has been steady and has yielded just 50+ mm. We're not getting the worst of the weather. That's reserved for the coast about 150 m east of Armidale where there are storm-force winds, huge seas, massive rainfall totals, and major flooding. Some places, Coffs harbour included, have had 200 mm of rain (about 8 inches) during the last 24 hours and closer to 250 mm (10 inches) since the rain started. If we add another 100 mm today the total for this rain event down there Coffs Harbour will have something like half of the annual rainfall expected on the south coast of England! And in just 3 days.

Fortunately, I decided to revive the lawns around our house with a large dose of fertiliser a couple of weeks ago and now I'm reaping the reward - lush green grass. A down-side to all this will be the need to mow the blasted turf repeatedly. A further minus is that Max won't be able to go to the skate-park to ride his scooter and BMX bike and will be at a loose end for the next day and half. After yesterday's performance at the opera, I suspect a suggested visit to the art gallery is off the menu. It's also much too cold for the town swimming pool. Anyway, that's likely to be closed, especially if inundated by a flooding Dumaresq creek. Ideas anyone?

AS


PS   I've just been down to the creek to see if it was flooding and indeed the waters are rising fast and several causeways are closed to traffic. I found one open and parked the car in the middle of the causeway to take this picture. Water was just beginning to flow across it and closure must be close. And the rain has intensified hugely. It's now monsoonal! By the way I got drenched taking it and I was sitting in the car with the window open! A lot of Australia might be desert, but at last the grass in Armidale is green as the picture shows.

Wedding?

Have you ever taken a restless 8 year old boy to an opera about relationships and intrigues between men and women and the eventual marriage of two of them? Well I tried it this afternoon, but ultimately the experiment was unsuccessful. The occasion was the inaugural performance by a new opera company, Opera New England. Fancy a town of 25,000 people (Armidale) being home to an opera company! And the opera was Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, one of the most famous in the repertoire. The small orchestra, of only 11 musicians, was largely local, but some of the cast were imported for the occasion.

Anticipating disaster, I booked the cheapest seats for Max and me, but we had a good view of the performance and the sound was excellent. We paid roughly 26 GBP for the two seats combined at The Armidale School's excellent auditorium. The seats were along the gallery at the side of the main tiered seating.

Alas, Max found most of the performance dull and couldn't understand the characters, the words they were singing, the 'jokes' or rather amusing asides, and the absence of beat! He began to wriggle and squirm; and add the sound of crunching potato crisps to that of the orchestra. He wondered repeatedly aloud when the first half (Acts I and II) was going to arrive. Only occasionally, during some of the energetic duets, did Max quieten and listen to the music. Indeed, occasionally he was riveted, but I doubt that he'll warm to the genre quickly.

During the interval Max and I made our way home and I missed the final two acts. Oh well, it was an experiment that failed and perhaps Max will remember it to his benefit. The pictures show the orchestra pit, the revolving stage with the cast arranged in a circle for the overture, and a scene from Act II.

AS

Cousins Meet Up

A couple of days ago, Hain and Abigail came over their home south of Kentucky (New England, not US) to see their cousin Max. After a brief chat, the impatient kids headed out to the creek-lands to ride their bikes and climb various pieces of play equipment.

They get on well as you can see from the expressions on their faces! Hain is just 6 months older than Max  and Abigail is just a bit younger.

AS

Blue Hole

After yesterdays' heavy rain, when Armidale itself received 45 mm of rain (getting on for 2 inches), we headed out to the Gara River and Blue hole to do some maintenance on one of my geocaches located in the Oxley-Wild Rivers National Park. On our arrival, the omens were poor that I could complete my task. To start with the Blue Hole was no longer its usual colour and was instead muddy brown with all the sediment being washed downstream.

Below the Blue Hole the Gara river was raging, and when we reached the metal bridge across the creek, the water was almost up to the top making it dangerous to cross, especially if the water level were rising! Since the bridge was the only way to access the path beyond it was possible I'd be marooned on the far side for a day or so! The cache itself lies atop the gorge, so there was no way it would be damaged by the torrent.

Anyway, we went for a lovely walk along the top of the gorge looking at the craggy rocks, the lovely wild flowers including the rock orchids shown here, the odd shy rock wallaby, pools of water coloured with blue-green algae, and glimpses of the raging waters increasingly far below.

After the walk we took morning tea at one of the many tables provided by the National Parks service for visitors. The park itself is world heritage listed - part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia region stretching along the Great Escarpment from the Barrington Tops north of Newcastle to South-East Queensland. This distance is almost 500 km (over 300 miles) long and includes 40 separate rainforest parks!

AS 

Waterslide

Since Max was going to stay with us for three weeks, Dot made the smart purchase of a waterslide which he found very useful in our hot weather. It's only a piece of plastic which we lay out on our sloping lawn (or what's left of it after it has been scorched by a relentless sun). There's a tube down one side which is attached to the end of one of our three garden hoses and when we turn the water on a spray of water comes out along the length of the slide to lubricate it. Then Max can run up to the slide clutching an inflated air raft and dive on to it ride the mat. Here he is in action when the temperature was 32 C yesterday:

AS

Coping With Warn weather

We are back in the middle of a heat wave with temperatures hovering in the low 30s. Slowly we are figuring out how to deal with this impost - for the record our average January temperatures are around 26 C, which is very pleasant indeed.

The first adjustment is to take my daily bike rides at 6 am, as today, or late in the afternoon when things have begun, slowly, to cool down. A second is to retreat to Armidale's very good swimming complex (the municipal one and not the other three pools at UNE and TAS). We took Max there this morning and he had a whale of a time - almost literally. He spent a lot of time under water, coming up occasionally for air. For him, the other advantages of the pool are the water mats one can hire, an endless supply of ice-creams and slushies, and a large number of kids his age with whom he can relate.

The little kid making this posting, i.e. me, was also in the water with him splashing out, shadow boxing, jumping on his mat, pulling him off and those sorts of things often called horse play.

Of course I also took along my kindle and down-loaded a wonderful book by Nassim Taleb, an economics professor from New York, who has developed the policy idea of antifragility (one word). This concept incorporates ideas very similar to those I've developed in my writings over the last five years or so! I might ask to meet him during my up-coming 5 weeks in the US. So, even in hot weather one can meld work and play!

The pictures attached are obvious from my description above, so I'll not trouble you with captions!

By the way, when we got into the car to come home its external thermometer was reading 38C!!

As

A Day at the Dam

Our heatwave reached its peak yesterday when the thermometer reached 36 C (or 97 F) and, like quite a few others we headed out for a picnic at a hopefully cooler - though not by much - spot. Our choice was Dumaresq Dam, which was once Armidale's water supply but is now am attractive recreation area with walking trails, camping, swimming, fishing and boating. And, as expected, there were lots of people camping at the site because there's no charge for staying over-night and using the facilities. You might also notice in the second photo that some of the trees at the camp-ground have been bonzied! Well, sort of! They've had their tops and bottoms cut off so that the vegetation is tabular.

We couldn't have a barbecue because the extreme heat and drying vegetation created a fire hazard and we didn't want to set the countryside alight and pay for the consequences of that! So it was a cold picnic of all the usual foods. We took chairs and a table in the RAV4's capacious luggage compartment along with with hampers and eskies (containers chilled by frozen tablets) to keep the beer and soft drinks cold. Max, who has now joined us for the last 3 weeks of the summer holidays, was in the party along with a family friend, Jane, and Rob's parents, Bruce and Marianne. So we set up lunch under a massive shady tree while Max went off to play in the nearby lake with some of the many kids his age. The lake is in the shadow of Mount Duval, shown on one of the following pictures, and its shallow edges make a safe playground for youngsters. The lake also has fish (including, I believe, trout) which Bruce st out unsuccessfully to catch. Max on the othr hand borrowed a plastic mug and managed a haul of very small fish!

All in all it was a very pleasant trip, though marred a little by very strong and hot winds as the afternoon progressed. These were the prelude to an amazing evening with ferocious storms. We had strong winds, heavy rain (thankfully), massive thunderheads, a vast amount of forked lightning (rather than the tame sheet variety), deafening growls from the sky, and ultimately power failure in our neighbourhood - probably from a lightning strike. The lights went out for 6 hours before coming back on at about 2.30 am. We haven't yet checked damage to the food in the freezer might the stuff might be OK despite the very hot over-night temperatures. This morning is something of a relief. The maxima today might only be about 23 C! Warm by UK standards but a great relief after 36.

AS

Stunning Lagerstroemia

Apologies to those who share this blog with me and are also in contact via Facebook. The posting is very similar!

Australia is going through a monumentally hot and dry period where effectively the rain has ceased in many places, Armidale included. However, one of the plants in our garden is loving the conditions and putting on its best display ever. It's Lagerstroemia, or better known as crepe myrtle, a largish shrub or small tree. It was planted by us perhaps 25 years ago and is now well established. It has clusters beautiful pink and wispy flowers all over and is a delight behold. Have look at two photos taken just an hour or so ago on a fine and sunny morning.

AS

Heatwave

The Bureau of Meteorology has just announced that the average temperature across Australia today was 39 degrees C (or just over 100 degrees F). Many places experienced temperatures in the low to mid 40s, but little old Armidale only managed about 28 C, which makes us one of the best places to live nationally right at the moment! Not only is it hot, but there's very little humidity across the continent. It's so dry that enormous numbers of intense bush-fires are breaking out across much of the country, though fortunately not in our region. Even our temperatures are on the rise. Tomorrow's maximum expected for Armidale is no less than 33 C and I doubt if we'll see a cloud all day!

AS