Well hello again!I'm back from my weekend adventure up to Canberra, Australia's capital, and as usual I have lots to tell! Check out all the pictures I took to go with today's stories.
I had a bit of time to kill at the airport so I finally caved and went to Macca's (McDonald's) for lunch. They had a few burgers on their menu that were unfamiliar to me, so I selected the McOz burger meal (it seemed somehow appropriate). This turned out to be similar to a Big Xtra, but with a slice of beetroot and shredded carrot on the burger. I think I've already said this, but beetroot appears to be a common topping for burgers and sandwiches here. It was a little odd, but quite tasty! The other thing I was actually pleased with (imagine that, being happy about going to McDonalds!) was the size of the meal. Unlike in Canada or the US, the "small" meal combos here actually come with a SMALL drink and a SMALL fries - not the large fries masquerading as a small fries that we get at home.
The rest of the trip went smoothly (I even napped on the plane) and the next thing I knew, I was in Canberra. Steve, Nikki's partner, met me at the airport and showed me around the town a little bit. Canberra has a population of about 350,000 people so it's quite a bit smaller than Melbourne or Sydney. It's a planned city and has lots of green spaces and wide avenues. I'm already looking forward to exploring it when Jen and I come back after Christmas.
We arrived at their house and Steve introduced me to the rest of the family - Nikki (my Guiding contact here) and their twin daughters Hannah and Jacqui. They also have a little terrier dog named Fifi and two orange cats named Marmalade and Twinkle Toes. Unsurprisingly, all the animals loved me (even Twinkle Toes, who apparently usually only associates with Hannah) and I was soon completely covered in cat and dog hair. I miss having my own pets.
Nikki's family is awesome - and fascinating! She homeschools her daughters, so this was my first opportunity to meet homeschooled kids and learn a little bit about what they do all day long. These girls are amazing. They take German lessons. Jacqui plays clarinet; Hannah plays guitar. Both girls used to be in a circus school and they continue to take juggling and unicycling lessons. In fact, they're the unicycling champions for their age group for all of Australia, and will be flying to Denmark next year to take part in the world championships! The day before I arrived, the girls had spent a day with other homsechooled kids, learning how to prepare various traditional Korean foods - so we had lots of leftover sushi and dumplings to sample.
I also loved Nikki's house. It seemed to me that every wall had been turned into a learning opportunity of some sort. I particularly loved their bathroom, which was plastered with art cards, the periodic table of elements, multiplication tables, comics, jokes, famous quotes, and much more. There was also a shelf of great books to peruse as you did what you do in the bathroom. Nikki told me she called it "education by stealth" - she'd found that her girls were much more likely to pick up a book and read it, if it was placed in the bathroom with a bookmark slotted partway through! (Sorry Nikki, your secret's out - but I'm gonna remember this technique to use in the future! I wonder if I can adapt it for my classroom?)
One of the cool Guiding traditions I like here is how the Guiders get their camp names. Most of the Australian Guiders I've met so far are named for local plants or animals - and they use the local Aboriginal names instead of boring old English. Well, Nikki, Jacqui and Hannah decided that I needed to have an Australian camp name - so they did a bit of online research and found the local Aboriginal word for a frilled-necked lizard (a type of dragon!). So I now have a new camp name - Binara. Don't worry - I'll still be answering to Dragon! But I'm very honored to have an Australian name too.
We headed off to camp late on Friday afternoon. Innabaanya, the Guide Camp for the ACT (Australian Capital Territory; much like the States, the Aussies have a separate territory around their capital that doesn't belong to any of the states), is located about a half hour outside the city centre, on the opposite side of a range of small mountains (or big hills). I only mention the hills because they will be important later in the story. The site is basically a couple of acres of field with scattered gum trees. There is a largeish building that sleeps 20 and a smaller building that's a storage shed on one side and a "leader's hut" on the other. There's also a cool dining shelter that has a wood stove and a gas barbecue in the middle. We had rented this structure for the weekend and that's where we did all our cooking, so we had no need for camp stoves.
I would like to point out that there were kangaroos at Innabaanya; apparently this local mob pretty much alwasy hangs around the camp. The roos were right in the middle of the site when we drove up, and they only hopped far enough away that we couldn't bother them. But they continued to hang around, so all weekend long I'd catch movement out of the corner of my eye and see a kangaroo (or two, or more) bouncing by in the distance or bending over to nibble on the grass. Strange! Because the roos were resident on the site, it did mean that the ground was covered in roo poo (sorry to those of you who got text messages about that); think about the problems the Toronto Islands have with Canada geese and you'll get an idea of what it was like. The other local wildlife that I paid a lot of attention to this weekend were the bull ants. They were everywhere. I took a picture of their nest and posted it on facebook so you can get an idea of how HUGE the nests are. I spent the entire weekend carefully avoiding walking over the tops of the ant nests that were all over the site. If someone did walk over a nest, the ants would go completely crazy. I understand that a bull ant bite is painful but not dangerous, and most folks at the camp just ignored the ants. Now, having said that, I've had the "pleasure" of being bitten by fire ants in South Carolina - so I'll just avoid stomping on the bull ants, thank you very much!
There were only seven girls at this camp and three other leaders besides me - Leah, Sue and Robin. Nikki wasn't feeling well and so wasn't able to stay for the camp itself, but she did come up and visit every day as best she could. But you've gotta admit, even with Nikki having to stay home, we had a pretty good leader-to-kid ratio! The girls were all senior Guides (aged somewhere between 10 and 13); for some of them this was their first camp experience, and for others (including Nikki's daughters), just another chance to hone their excellent camp skills. The girls were split into two patrols and they did everything with their patrol team.
Rain was threatening as we set up camp, so we all worked together to raise the two tents that the girls would be sleeping in. I was in for a bit of a surprise - when I went to pick up one of the tent bags, it was REALLY heavy! This turned out to be mostly because there were about eight zillion poles for the tents. And then once the tents were all put together, they ended up resembling the Eureka Bon Echo tents that we use at Woolsey - except with twice the poles, reinforced floors, and a screened in vestibule area. The ground at the camp was rock hard and it was really difficult to pound the pegs in. We were all so tired after putting up these two huge tents that the leaders decided we'd sleep inside the leaders' cabin. Our only other alternative was to put up an even huger tent for three of us (Robin had brought her own little tent; she claimed that she snored and didn't want to disturb any of us in the night). So since Robin was sleeping outside, the other three of us decided that indoors was ok for us. In the end I'm glad I was inside; the nights were on the cold side (I'm turning in to such a wimp!) and once again I managed to not pack the long underwear.
It started to rain soon after we'd put up the girls' tents (yet another reason I was glad to be sleeping indoors; we'd've had to put up the leaders' tent in POURING rain), so we spent some time working on grace cards (I learned new graces!) and having an evening snack, and then the girls headed off to bed. I swear I'm gonna become a professional rain-maker - I'm beginning to think the rainclouds are following me around Australia! It actually rained most of the night, which I understand is a long time for it to be raining here.
Saturday's activities were awesome. The theme of the weekend was "Survivor", so we spent all day playing a huge wide game that consisted of various Survivor-style challenges. First, the patrols had to build themselves some "treemail" boxes so they could get their clues throughout the day. Then, whilst they were being distracted with a picture-taking opportunity, Leah placed the first challenges in the completed treemail boxes. The patrols had to make team flags and build shelters in the pine woods behind the camp. The next challenge had them doing first aid on one of their members for an imaginary snake bite, and fashioning stretchers out of whatever they had available to transport the victim. They built rope ladders, made an obstacle course out of rope, "fish" for points in a toy fish pond and sneak up on a leader in order to capture their lunch.
In the afternoon, the girls faced a number of challenges that involved water. They did a version of the "marble tracks" challenge where water had to be transported from one bucket to another using channels... but here the channels were made out of strips of gum tree bark, not pvc piping. Then they had to build rafts out of straws in an attempt to get off the "island". In the end, they had to escape using the Slip-n-Slide we'd set up whilst they were building the rafts. Not surprisngly, this was a huge hit (the girls hadn't known it was coming!). I would like to point out that by the time we got to playing with the Slip-n-Slide, the temperature had turned decidedly cool and it was spitting again - but the girls were adamant that they still wanted to play in the water - so we sent them off to get into their bathers (swim suits) and down they went! As if that wasn't enough, after the Slip-n-Slide, the girls played a version of "Capture the Flag" which involved water balloons and flour bombs. What a mess! The nice thing about this campsite, though, is that there are shower stalls - so everyone ended the afternoon with a hot shower.
After dinner, it was time for campfire. A contingent of Brownies from the region had come up to sleep out over the Saturday night, so we invited them to join us for the campfire. Three of the Guides were in charge of the campfire program, and they did a good job. I got to introduce a number of songs from Canada, too. I am slowly infecting the entire country with the song "Today is Monday", which was so popular at camp last summer. Once the Brownies headed off to bed, we roasted marshmallows before dousing the fire. Before we headed off to bed, we enjoyed an interesting evening snack! At dinner we'd combined cake mix and rolos into large plastic oven roasting bags. While we were at campfire, one of the other leaders had taken these mixes and sat them in boiling water until the cake mix cooked through. The result was very similar to pudding cake mix... the rolos melted into gooey goodness and spread throughout the cake. MMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmm.... definitely something to try again at home!
On Sunday, we had to drag the girls out of bed (everyone was a wee bit tired from the late night). We were off to a bit of a slow start but after dealing with breakfast, Guide's Own and packing up the site, we headed off on a hike. Innabaanya backs on to a big hill (or small mountain) and the girls were determined to reach the top of it. Turned out that the route to the top was pretty darn steep, up slopes covered in loose rock. It was a challenging climb for me but I did it! Not all the girls wanted to climb all the way up, and they turned back with Leah and Sam, but Robin and I and four girls went all the way. The photo at the start of this entry shows us high up on the hill with the city of Canberra barely visible in the background.
Soon after we returned from the hike, it was time to leave. I passed out crests, pencils, and maple candies, which everyone enjoyed. When Nikki arrived at the end of the camp to pick us all up, we learned that it had simply POURED rain in Canberra - to the point where she'd had concerned parents calling her up, asking her if we were all ok out at the camp! At Nikki's house it rained 80mm in a short few hours, with over 40mm falling in one hour! Her entire street flooded! But out at the camp, that range of hills I described earlier must've helped direct the worst of the storms away from us. So although it did rain on us at camp, it could've been much, much worse.
After returning to Nikki's house and having a shower, I felt much better. Steve and Nikki treated me to barbecued kangaroo steaks and sausages for dinner. It was delicious. When dinner was over, we all sat down and played a number of Australian board games. I really liked "Menagerie", where the object of the game was to fill each of your Australian habitats with the correct species, while avoiding environmental disasters such as wildfire and feral foxes.
This morning I woke up feeling rather stiff and sore, after all the walking yesterday. Stupid hill. Steve took me on a bit of a scenic driving tour on the way back to the airport, so I got to see a little more of downtown Canberra and have my bearings for when Jen and I come back in a month. Then it was back on the plane and back to Melbourne.
I arrived back in Melbourne to - you guessed it - more pouring rain. Seems like there was a pretty serious series of storm cells that moved up the east coast of Australia over the weekend, so Melbourne had seen a lot of rain too. Of course it rained the heaviest just as I was getting on the bus to come home. The rain let up a little bit whilst I was in transit, and then it downpoured again heavily when I got off the bus to dash for home! Gah.
I have it on good authority that Jen had a grand, lazy weekend. She slept in, did some shopping, and bought some artwork as a Christmas present for her friend Dan (don't worry, he knows about it, so I'm not ruining any surprises here). But she was back at the really tough school she doesn't like today, and she'll be there again tomorrow. I'm pretty sure she's looking forward to getting a break from that place - it's a private school and will let out for the holidays a week earlier than the public schools do.
In the meantime, we'll be heading out tomorrow to do a campfire with a group of Guides on the other side of Melbourne tomorrow, and we've really got to get cracking on our Christmas and travel plans. But we'll save all that for another day. I'm TIRED. Time for bed!
