Big-Chill #3 People enjoying themselves

The pictures presented here will hopefully reveal the Big Chill's great atmosphere on Saturday afternoon as the sun set and darkness encroached. This first three pictures reveal the stage in the middle where the bands played. On either side there were large screens focusing on the bands playing. All show the large and active crowds.

Again, look at the large number of active people. The area in front of the stage is full of people dancing.

Overseeing the event was a nearly full moon

And here a picture looking at the sun-set in the west.

And, finally, here are some videos of the event. Let's hope they work! 

Big Chill #2 Food and Drink

Apart from listening to great bands' music, the great attraction of the Big Chiil was the large number of businesses selling drinks or food. Some of the operations are shown below. The whole event occurred on grasslands adjacent to Dumaresq Creek, which runds through the centre of Armidale. After all our recent rains, the grasslands were rather soggy in places, but that didn't seem to worry me or the remaining participants. 

I didn't count all the businesses supplying food and drink, but my guess is that there were maybe 8 foodies and 10 local or regional breweries. The first picture below shows the Orange Duck Kitchen which ... if I'm correct! ... supplies Asian foods.

And here's the Humble Cook!

And here's a string of craft brewers.

I like the beer produced by the Welder's Dog which has a very popular drinking house in town. I made a wise choice in the beer I consumed!

Another beer rpoducer is Great Hops whose brewery lies on the edge of town.

Apart from foodies like the Orange Duck, a range of businesses providing a variety of sauces and other additions had stall participating in a competition. They were on the western side of the nearby lake shown here.

Another beer producer was theWicked Elf ... something I've never heard of.

Many of these pictures were taken on Saturday morning before the huge crowds emereged in late afternnon. I reckon that maybe 2,500 people attended this gathering as the sun went down ... or perhaps 1 in 10 of Armidale's population.

Big Chill #1

Armidale has an entertaining event called the Big Chill which is a community-oriented introduction to winter. This year, the BC took place over two days on the 14th and 15th May. Basically, people come together to enjoy top-class food and drink while listening and even dancing to music from excellent bands.

This year the organisers - the Armidale Regional Council - added another relevant event. This was an ice-skating event and this post - the first of three - starts by showing a couple of pictures of residents of all ages from about 2 years old to 80 trying to skate on ice. There was one major problem, however. Normally in mid-May daytime temperatures hover around 14 C. This year, May has sometimes recorded Summer temperatures here and, while these pictures were taken, the temperature was about 23 C!! That's 73 F.

Somehow or other, the operators of the ice rink had to cool the surface to 0 C (32 F) or less. I don't know how they did it, but the crowds of people skating were having a great time. As you can see from the photos, few people were wearing Winter gear!

As you can also see, the weather on Sunday looked for a while rather threatening. Unusually this year we have had massive and flooding rainfalls along much of Australia's eastern seaboard - including our New England Region. Last week was little different , but fortunately the BC weekend spared damaging rain.