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.