Gardners Down Under

Saturday, July 3, 2010

gardner parents come to aus, june to august 2010

the gardner parents, bill and chris, came for seven weeks this winter to visit us in adelaide and do some down under exploring. they got to see quite a bit, including the cairns/northern queensland area and the great barrier reef; victor harbor; wilpena pound in the flinders ranges, south australia; and wine-tasting tour of the barossa valley. they were a huge help to preggo me while payton was in the great artesian basin for two weeks on a sampling trip. nova LOVED spending so much time with grandma and grandpa. bill and chris were also here for the birth of canon heysen and got to spend his first week of life with him. again, the folks were invaluable when it came to doting on nova - taking her to school, to the zoo, on the bus, to get "lollies" (candy - bad grandma!), etc. - to make sure she got enough attention as a new big sister. their last day here, we celebrated bill's 62nd birthday and nova's (early) 3rd birthday.

in northern queensland

the great barrier reef

while payton was in the gab, drilling and sampling and generally freezing his ears off, nova, the gardners and i played around adelaide...

nova and chris at henley beach

feeding roos at cleland wildlife park

lots o luv for mama

back at henley beach

god is still a broncos fan, even in australia...., henley beach

bill and chris at henley beach

the henley beach jetty

payton eventually returned home and as soon as he was barely rested we all charged down to victor harbor - making a mental note of the victor harbor hospital location in case i went in to early labor. we enjoyed a long weekend there; bill and chris hiked part of the heysen trail, we drove along goolwa beach, took the horse-drawn trolley to granite island - home of a colony of fairy penguins, watched a southern right whale mama and baby in horseshoe bay, and had a john denver sing-along in the car on the way home.

ugh.

checking out tide pools with daddy along king's beach, heysen trail

bill and chris hiking the heysen trail

looking back at the cliffs along the heysen trail

nova on goolwa beach - finally, enough room for her to run!

grandma and nova playing in the southern ocean, goolwa beach

nova, daddy and grandpa; goolwa beach

the flinders range, where bill and chris visited wilpena pound and where the heysen trail begins

nova playing cardboard guitar - not sure if she'll go in to rock, folk or punk...

in usual parent style, the gardners - like my parents - seem to know more people in our neighborhood than we do. bill, like my dad, frequented the red lantern lunch cafe just at the end of our block and was on a first name basis with the entire crew. now WE have to remember their names!

just one day after bill and chris had returned from their week-long flinders range/wilpena pound trip, canon heysen gardner was born! they were able to enjoy and share in nova's first week as a big sister and canon's first week as a new little life on earth.

happy grandma

new born

despite the excitement of a new baby, the port adelaide power footy team were able to draw payton and bill away for an afternoon. bill got so in to australia, he even got himself a pair of rossi boots and an akubra..

bill also got so in to the footy that he began working out at the norwood stadium, home of the redlegs footy club and only a block from our house. bill definitely achieved mateship status with chad, the redlegs' athletic trainer, and was given a redlegs footy ball - signed by chad, a redlegs t-shirt and a redlegs singlet (think muscle shirt)!!! bill and payton finally got in a father-son workout in at hallowed ground...

celebrating bill's birthday at the central market with a "platter" from zedz cafe.

we had a small birthday celebration on bill and chris' final evening - for bill's actual birthday and as a kick-off for the first of nova's four! celebrations (c'mon, you need one for each set of grandparents, the weekend party with friends and the actual day...!) payton made barramundi and prawn green chili enchilada lasagna and seafood rice!!!!! yum yum! (phil, can that be an entry in the chili cook-off? we'll have to import the barra...) we had cake and ice cream for dessert of course. grandma and grandpa gave nova a blue "guitar" (ukelele) and she has been requiring twice daily jam sessions with payton ever since... payton hasn't played this much guitar in a looong time!

we were sad to see the gardners leave - nova got so upset, she required an emergency muffin to make it out of the airport - but it was an AWESOME trip. my folks will be here in september for a month to meet canon, and then iris - its your turn!!

cheers all!

great artesian basin sampling trip; july 2010

payton's final sampling trip of the season was back up in the great artesian basin, on the western edge of the simpson desert and off the oodnadatta track. gone for another two weeks, we had a number of back up plans in case i went in to labor early (i was 34 weeks pregnant when he left and having delivered nova at 36 1/2 weeks, we were potentially cutting it close). all was mellow, however, and i had the help of the gardner parents, bill and chris, during this stint.

payton et al were drilling and sampling core in yet another beautiful, remote and iconic australian outback setting...

All I have to say here is, other than the killing people thing, I know what war feels like now. To sum up, its cold and you don't sleep very much. One thing I learned, never be the only vacuum tech on a 24 hour drilling program.

before: new steel-toed rossi elastic-sided boots for drilling

payton's swag - the best 2-4 hours of the day.

payton's "field lab"

drilling (everyone worked 12 hr shifts while in the field - that's fourteen 12s! ugh - and despite setting swags apart from the drill site, the noise could still be heard at camp. after the trip, i woke up to payton yelling "why aren't we drilling?!", thinking/dreaming the silence was due to the rig being shut down...)

after: not so new steel-toed boots

alligator gorge, mt remarkable national park, sa; june 2010

we visited alligator gorge in the southern flinders with friends brian and jessica over the queen's (i think that's queen victoria) birthday (june 14th). we all had a great time camping and hiking. It was good to be back in canyon country!

at camp

hiking in alligator gorge

hiking with two...

alligator gorge

playing with fire... nova on jessica's lap

lindsey, nova, payton and jessica

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Cairns/Northern Queensland holiday; late may 2010

after an exhausting 2 1/2 weeks of single parenting (i know, i'm a total sissy. sam, i don't want to hear it...), nova and i flew up to cairns, queensland for a happy, tearful (on my part; i can call the pregnancy card for that emotional overflow) reunion and a week-long tropical holiday!

ellis beach, where we stayed...

ellis beach

hartley's crocodile farm

saltwater croc

feeding the crocs

mossman gorge - went for a swim in cool, refreshing, fresh water. beautiful!

daintree rainforest, heading to cape tribulation. lookout over coral sea and daintree river.

daintree river lookout

enjoying the cape tribulation beach

skyrail over the rainforest to kanunda village

Fitzroy R/Daly R Sampling Trip; early May 2010

payton abandoned his little family in early may for 2 1/2 weeks to go sample the fitzroy river in northern western australia and the daly river in the northern territory. nova and i visited the wildlife park and took bubble baths...

here's what payton did...

Its all boiled down to this. I've been to school for 26 of my 32 years of existence, and hold a couple advanced degrees - none of which is much help as I am helping Allistair rewire the govenor of the Jetranger, along the banks of a crocodile infested river in one of the more remote places on the global map. She'll be right.

It was a wild and wooly trip. 3000 km of outback tracks in behind the windshield of our trusty Cruiser. 1000 km of river travel from a trusty(?) Jetranger helicopter. We covered a good portion of Kimberly plateau, and sampled along the majority of one of its longest and most important river systems. It was amazing on a personal and professional level to work on such a large river system with essentially no white fella development.

It's a trip working in the north of Australia trying to conduct a scientific sampling trip in an area where the traditional owners have a culture ~60,000 years old, which embraces a paradigm that is um... the complete opposite from a western scientist's trying to push a very complicated, remote field sampling trip through in a short amount of time. Very cool, however, to meet some locals, and get a bit of feel of their world. The oldest continuous culture in the world - by a long shot. You got to respect.

The Kimberly is a beautiful area, reminds me a bit of Utah blown up to the size of Alaska and set in the sub tropics. As long as your there in the early dry season its paradise. After that it turns to a very hot hell, which then becomes submerged in a deluge making all travel impossible. Sampling was good and fun, but the details are only cool if you're a geek and therefore not cool by definition. After a hell of a trip in Northwestern WA it was time to catch a flight over Darwin, to sample the mighty Daly River in the Northern Territories...

We sampled the Daly via boat. A small, flat bottomed metal boat (or tinnie in Australian). I might mention here that the Daly River has one of the world's largest crocodile populations. It was a very small tinnie.

Now I've been on a river or two. In some respects traveling up and down the Daly was a lot like those other rivers I've been on, except that we generally didn't have a shot gun on board, and this one was not for shooting pidgeons or ducks. Oh yea, and this river had lots of animals which would like to eat you.

Crocodiles aside, it was cool to work on a truly tropical river. The river gage was amazing, the difference from the low water to high water mark on the gage was ~ 60m. To put that in perspective, flood stage on the Lochsa gauge in northern Idaho is around 5m. We sampled several springs which flow into the Daly and a number of bores in the area. Water allocations are just being drawn up on the Daly. Its different to be in there trying to help inform decisions on sustainable water budgets before the resource becomes over allocated.

After two and a half weeks in the field, I was tired and missed my girls quite a bit. It was time to finish my trip right across the "top end", and catch another flight to northeastern Queensland and catch up with ladies on the beach.