Sculptures by the Sea

Great sculpture installation on the coastal walk by our house right now.  It attracts so many people from all over the city that we had to wait until a weekday evening before we dared to go down there.  Pretty cool stuff…

 

 

 

Michigan Visit

We spent a wonderful two week in Michigan enjoying the long days of summer with family.  Click on the photo to see more.

Great Barrier Reef

Photos from our trip to Port Douglas and the Great Barrier Reef here.

Happy to say the Great Barrier Reef lived up to its standing as one of the natural wonders of the world.  We spent 6 days/5 nights in Port Douglas with Kristin’s family visiting from Michigan (Carol, Parker and Olivia).  Port Douglas is the easy-going resort town north of Cairns (major hub where we flew in) that serves as a launching point for many reef cruises.  The trip was great for two main reasons: 1) Snorkeling on the reef was outstanding and 2) the trip as a whole was relaxing, warm, tropical and felt like a true vacation.

First #2.  We scored a fantastic self-contained apartment right on the beach.  The 3 BR house, part of a balinese-themed compound of 8 other units, featured a fully stocked kitchen and a beautiful outdoor veranda with a BBQ so we could relax and cook all our own meals.  We also got lucky and arrived the same weekend that a monthly fishing boat shows up to unload fresh prawns, bugs (kind of like lobster) and scallops by the kilo.  We stocked up on enough for the whole week and BBQ’d to our hearts content every night.  Yum.  The house was right on the aptly named Four Mile Beach (facing east), and all the adults made it a point to watch the sunrise every morning (and I was happy to get a soft surface to run on every day).

At 18 degrees latitude, the climate in winter was ideal (sunny and mid-high 70’s) and made for a very relaxing tropical vacation.  We ate fresh coconuts that fell from the trees lining the beach.  Yes, tropical indeed.

On to the reef.  Several companies run daily boat trips out to the Reef – about 70 kms (1.5 hours) off the coast to get to the outer reef.  We chose a company that had a newer boat (faster and more stable) and made stops at three different reefs for snorkeling and diving.  At each of the three stops everyone puts on their gear, jumps into the warm water, and gets treated to a fantastic display of marine life.  Carol had a go at diving while the rest of us enjoyed the theatrics from the surface with our snorkels.  It was truly amazing.  We saw electric-blue starfish the size of a frisbee, giant clams the size of a large stuitcase, and honestly too many colorful fish to keep track of.  It was brilliant to see hundreds of fish swimming together in schools and changing directions simultaneously as if it was choreographed. But a favorite of everyone was the probably the reef shark, with it’s unmistakable profile that grabs your attention no matter how safe anyone tells you it is.  We all loved the experience so much we signed up to go back for the same trip 2 days later.

No pictures to tell the underwater story, unfortunately, but google great barrier reef snorkeling and you’re sure to come up with some good ones.

Luminous Sydney

There is a great festival going on in Sydney right now called Luminous Sydney. According the website, it’s “a festival of music, ideas, light and performance.”  The most obvious and dramatic aspect of the festival is the Lighting of the Sails. Each night from 5:30 to late -  both sides of the Opera House shells (or sails as they are sometimes called) are illuminated with colorful projections of light.  It’s pretty cool.  When i run home from work each night (yeah, i’ve been reduced to a run-commuter now), i run through Circular Quay (main ferry terminal adjacent to opera house) and around the Botanical Gardens with great views of the Opera House the whole time.  It’s really fun to see a different color pattern projected each night.

This weekend we joined our friends Jen and Michael to go to one of the shows of the Festival – Reggie Watts from Seattle.  I knew nothing of Reggie Watts before sitting down for the show… and he blew me away.  He is a one-man show creatively weaving together music, spoken word, and stand up improvisation.  He uses a little electronic mixer to record his own voice in real time to form multiple layers of a song – i.e bass and percussion – and then sings/raps over the top of it.  Really creative stuff.

Here are a few pics of the Lighting of the Sails and the Reggie Watts show.  Some of the pics were taken with our new camera.  I’ve had my eye on this one since December, but no camera shop in Australia could keep it in stock long enough to buy it.  I finally tracked one down and nabbed it – Panasonic LX3 with a brilliant Leica lense.  It rocks.

Nelson Bay

This past weekend Kristin and I met friends Kate and Craig in Nelson Bay.  Kate and Craig are friends from Melbourne who I originally met in Boulder during one of Kate’s marathon training stints a few years back.  (She is an Olympic marathoner and often visits Boulder for high altitude training stints).  We finally found an opportunity to meet up in Nelson’s Bay (about 3 hours north of Sydney), where she and Craig had already planned a weekend getaway.

We spent a wonderful weekend cooking together, going for trail runs in the hills, reading magazines, and walking on the beach.  The apartment we rented  had a BBQ and  beautiful views overlooking the bay so we were quite happy just relaxing in the apartment and taking a break from the city.  I BBQ’d my first whole fish bought from the local fish monger on the docks, and Kate made us our first pavlova – an Australian dessert comprised of a crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside meringue with fresh fruit topping.  It was an excellent weekend with good friends.

A couple “snaps” from the weekend here…

Room with a view

I’m still using the hand-me-down point n shoot camera my dad gave me (after my dslr camera got stolen with my car and my  point n shoot camera broke).  Despite its limitations, it has been invaluable in documenting some of our experiences here.  We love sitting out on our balcony in the evenings and watching the colors of the sky change behind the city and harbor.  Our favorite part is when the bats rise out of the botanical gardens (just after the sun goes down) and thousands of them swoop by our balcony on their way to their feeding grounds in Centennial Park.  Some of them are so close we could almost touch them.  The camera lense isn’t big enough to capture the bats during such low light conditions, so you’ll just have to imagine it in the photo above… it’s alsmost like a scene out of Batman.  Here’s a link to a YouTube video that gives you some indication…

South Coast Road Trip

Easter is a big holiday in Australia.  Kids get a week or two off school and everyone else gets a 4 day weekend (and hot cross buns take over cafes menues for the preceding month).  The 4-day weekend is important, because no other holiday here receives such a designation (they obviously don’t celebrate Independence Day or Thanksgiving).  We took advantage by renting a campervan and driving down the south coast, stopping and camping at little beaches along the way.  Our favorites were Congo Point, which had a 4 mile long beach perfect for barefoot running and a shallow break great for body surfing.  And Pebble Beach, with wildlife that you couldn’t make up in the movies: kangaroos and giant goanna lizards mingling on the bluffs, colorful parrots swooping from tree to tree, and at one point, we looked up from our beach chairs to see 15-20 dolphins within 50 meters from the beach.  It was one of those experiences that knocks you over the head and reminds you you’re not in Kansas anymore.

After 4 days on the coast we turned inland and drove into the mountains of Kosciuszko National Park.  While their “mountain” classification would be a stretch by Colorado standards, they nevertheless offered cool autumn air and beautiful scenery.  Also notable is that Mt Kosciuszko is the tallest in Australia, and therefore one of the seven summits of the world (tallest mountains on each continent).   So of course i had to run up and tag the summit while Kristin went for a nice run/hike lower on the mountain. A campfire that night provided a wonderful ending to our first road trip in Australia.

A few photos here.

Tasmania

The South Coast Track

We happily received our first family visitor this month!  My dad, Buzz, flew in from Boulder on January 30 for a 3 week visit to Australia.  After a week of trundling around Sydney, he and I left for an adventure together in Tasmania.  It had been eight years since he and I joined up on a trip like this (we traveled to Patagonia and Peru together in 2001-02), and it was good to be on an overseas trip together again.

Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains National Park is a two hour train ride west of Sydney and offers an easy weekend getaway for the wary Sydneysider (as we are called).   Kristin and I ventured there this weekend for some much needed respite from our urban environment, namely fresh air and open space.

Before we go any further and you develop imagery of grandeur in your head suggested by a name like the Blue Mountains, let me set one thing straight: the blue mountains are neither mountains nor are they blue.  If I was an explorer back in the day and I discovered this swath of land, i probably would have named it ‘The Green Hills with Some Cliffs’.  But that’s why I ended up as an engineer instead of a storyteller.  Anyway…

On Friday afternoon Kristin and I hopped on a train and headed west for our weekend getaway.  After about an hour of tunneling through Sydney urban sprawl, the countryside started to open up and we soon reached Katoomba, the region’s primary urban center and our home for the weekend.

Christmas in New Zealand

Our first vacation called for a trip abroad. One may ask why not use our 14 days to explore the vast expanses of Australia, our new homeland, and that would be a valid point. But as we experienced (Kristin’s first time, Galen’s return), the South Island of New Zealand affords a breadth of dramatic and varied landscape in a relatively compact space that make for a ideal 2 week roadtrip experience.

New Zealand’s South Island is known by Maori as Te Wai Pounamu translation- “Water of Greenstone” and we surely found water to be one of the defining features of our trip; 9 out of our 12 nights we backed our campervan up water (mountain lake, river, or ocean). Not a bad way to end and start a day on the road.

Our campervan, complete with double size bed and kitchenette (2 burner stove, microwave, sink, refrig)  provided us the means to sleep, cook and relax in some of the most beautiful places in the country at our own pace.  No bus or train schedules to negotiate, hostels or hotels to hunt down each night, or (god forbid) tents to set up.  We simply drove until we found a nice place to make dinner and watch the sunset, and sleep.  This concept known as “freedom camping” is one of the defining characteristics of road tripping in New Zealand and is one of the many factors making it such a pleasurable travel experience.  Unlike in the U.S., freedom camping is a widely accepted practice in New Zealand, and is actually encouraged as a measure to reduce car accidents associated with sleepy drivers.

The pictures capture our trip… for a more detailed version, you can click below and read our notes on the highlights. (We admit this is a extra long post, so bare with us as we use this post to act as a general documentation system.)