Conference Presentation

I have just presented our paper to the Western Regional Science meeting in Santa Barbara. It was fun and went well, even though the subject was ostensibly dry - namely, the elasticities in supply for residential accommodation in Adelaide, 2000 - 2012!

It's been a glorious day, so I'll head out for another walk prior to the President's reception.

AS

A Walk Along the Foreshores

Having been quiet for a little while I think it wise to confirm I'm still alive, though I've shifted location. Right now I'm Santa Barbara a little north of Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast and I'm here for a conference of the Western Regional Science Association, of which I'm a member, beginning two hours from now and for the happy event some of you will have heard about a few days ago. That was the arrival of Flynn Sorensen Castle in Mountain View, California - about 450 km up the road up highway 101. Rather serendipitous don't you think.

Anyway, I arrived here two days ago thanks to my colleague Ralph McLaughlin who works at San Jose State University near Mountain View and who ferried me to see Flynn, Emily and Greg on Friday when Flynn was only a day old. Yesterday I took the opportunity of a walk along the Pacific Coast and I attach come pictures of the location. I have to say that from what I have seen of it ... and I was last in Santa Barbara in 1984 (apart from a dash through it on 101 last year en route to LA) ... it's a rather laid back city and home to a somewhat alternative culture.

Here are some first visual impressions, arranged in no particular order
The groounds of the Fess Parker Hotel where I'm staying.:

Skate-board park on the beach. Max would have been at home here.

Why do so many cities have quaint public transport like these electric trolleys?

Stearne's Wharf - a tourist trap!

Santa Barbara from the Wharf ... nice location, eh!

Boat Harbour

Coastline to the south-east!

Arts and Crafts Sale. Numerous stalls we laid out over a km long next to the shore-line selling local creations of various kinds: paintings, glass-ware, jewellery, pottery and so on! Very interesting.

No comment

Bike hire was popular and this model looks like the one reported on these pages a month ago.

A close-up of the mountains.

I walked faster after seeing this!

AS

Train Ride

This is the last of my Cockington Green postings. The gardens also boasted a miniature railway, but not the ones already seen. This one pulled a passenger train around the gardens on a picturesque elevated track hauled by a steam engine. Max very much enjoyed the ride which delivered us back to the "Parsons Nose" tea house - typical of those found in the English countryside - for a quick snack before heading home.

Max enjoyed reading the questionable sign from the Somerset and Dorset Railway, as would most small boys!

AS

Cockington Green

Those of you from Devon, and especially the Torquay area, might know of the village of Cockington. Well, Canberra has Cockington Green, which consists of (a) picturesque scenes of British countryside and (b) a collection of buildings from around the world sponsored by various embassies in Canberra, and the first collection is at a scale of of about 1/16. The second set of buildings are at numerous different scale because it's hard to model Machu Picchu at the same scale as the Triumphal Arch at Palmyra in Syria, Don Quijote's Windmills, Tenochtitlan Temple in Mexico, Persepolis in Iran, or Karlsteijn Castle in the Czech Republic.

The British models were taken from all over the country as the following pictures show: Devon, Sussex (Lewes), Midlands, East Anglia, the Scottish Highlands, and so on. There were also models of a soccer stadium with a game in progress - see if you can spot a streaker being apprehended by a cop whose helmet covers the former's private parts - a cricket match and a fox hunt, among others. The crowd watching the soccer match were also singing the kinds of songs one regularly hears at grounds. Also, see the model inter-city 125 train which Max enjoyed controlling and the Castle of Mar (which I first read as Max). All the models were set in beautiful grounds with carefully manicured lawns, miniature trees, and glorious flower-beds.

The following photos show some of the international exhibits. They had a miniature railway system running between the various buildings, this time with parallel tracks, and Max and I raced trains around the circuit. He won! Bec and I both visited one of the sites shown here. That was La Boca, a suburb of Buenos Aires and home to the famous soccer club Boca Juniors whose scarf adorns my office at UNE. The penultimate picture shows the cliff railway at Lynmouth in Devon - surprisingly included in the international collection as representing something quintessentially British by the UK High Commission in Canberra!

AS

Model T Bicycle

I've just spent a couple of nights in Canberra after returning Max to home base. Dot on the other hand stayed in Sydney to look after her ailing brother, Dick.

Not having ridden my bike for a couple of days, I was beginning to suffer withdrawal symptoms and one of the things I managed to cram in during my short visit was a cycling trip (sort of) around the shores Lake Burley Griffin. The mode of transport was, however, strange. Instead of two wheels it had four. And in a design sense it resembled a model T Ford c. 1920, though with one major difference. Ford himself preferred colour (or should I say color) black, but our model was bright red with a splash of yellow. And while you've all heard of "a bicycle made for two", the vehicle shown below seated three.

Like the early model Ts - or just about early motor car - the appointments were rather crude: a very simple brake, little suspension and no gears. The last-named made cycling up even gentle hills rather difficult. However, it did come with two steering wheels, but Bec's worked while mine didn't and I automatically tried to steer the contraption to great frustration. We even let Max steer for part of the journey, but that was dangerous because the little fellow had crazy ideas about what constitutes a straight line. It also had two sets of working bike chains and pedals, which was just as well when it came to going up hill.

As you can imagine, our model T version was nothing like a racing bike but we attempted the world speed record for such a machine and, after pedaling furiously along a flat stretch, we managed about 10 kph! No-one was around though to verify our claim, so we won't make the Guinness Book of Records. By the way, Emily, our route took us to spot you'll probably remember - the Carillon. It's still there but we discovered the designers omitted to include sufficient turning space for a model T bike. Going the other way, we almost reached the National Museum.

AS

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