cornea

Walking home from work I made a short detour down to Puckey’s Beach and nabbed a relatively easy geocache. Found it just as the sun dipped below the escarpment. Some previous buggery geocache put a big black plastic spider inside the cache which gave me a stupid little scare… I left the spider for the next unfortunate soul and placed a button inside.

Being on the beach, even cold as it was, is making me look forward to summer this year!

Also, a screencap of the available caches in the greater Wollongong area… so many caches, but plenty of time!

Out to lunch on Saturday at Austi Beach Cafe, thought I’d check out any local caches and show our friend Ben what geocaching actually was. Had a lovely walk in the sunshine and waitin for summer to kick in…

Headlands

Austi Beach, couldn’t find the micro cache hidden by the carpark…

Under the train tunnel which used to scare Ben

The view from the GZ up in cricket park, finally pegged my first cache.

The interface of the app I use to hunt my caches! I can search for nearby caches, save cache locations for when I have no signal and use either google maps or the compass to hone it on the cache. Much easier to geocache with this app, and saves me from buying an expensive GPS.

Went on our first geocaching excursion this Sunday and while we were unfortunately DNF all three we set out for, we saw some beautiful places we have not visited before.

The first location was in the middle of Lake Illawarra and as we were not equipped with the correct wading gear (had hoped the water would be low enough to scurry across) we had to simply stare in the general direction of the cache.

There were also millions (MILLIONS) of teeny cute crabs scurrying around.

So onwards to the Minnamurra Rainforest . The cache was located outside the gates to the national park, but we thought we would go in and take the rainforest walk.

However, using an iPhone as a GPS had some drawbacks- namely the reception conked out being so close to the escarpment cliffs. So driving in and out of range trying to pinpoint the exact location was not conducive to finding the small cache. Alas, we decided to drive to the final cache we’d planned for the day in the hopes of finding at least one of the caches. . .

Kangaroo Valley, being a valley and all, gave us the same reception problems as Minnamurra. Being prepared for reception drop-out this time, we had scoured the cache decription to fully prepare us. After ~5 km down a dirt road (leaving Pete’s car filthy) and narrowly avoiding a wombat

we came to the cache GZ (grab zone). We also came to the three families camping right on top of the GZ. Being in the middle of nowhere we could not nonchalently stroll next to their campsite poking around under their camping chairs without awkward repercussions. So we went for a short walk and enjoyed the scenery.

In the summer time we might come back for a spot on canoeing and maybe white water rafting.

So all in all it was both unsuccessful and successful . . . I’ve downloaded the iPhone app from Groundspeaker which will help a lot, being able to download nearby caches and work offline when there is no cellphone reception. Maybe next weekend will be more fruitful!

For more on geocaching check out http://www.geocaching.com/default.aspx !

Keep them doggies movin’

Rawhide!

Went out for dinner at a real Texan BBQ place, Sonny’s, withsome of the folks from UTD Nanotech.

Less of an onion ring, more of an onion inner tube. The beer was literally frosty cold, and I had to use two hands to pick that sucker up.

And, so so much food. I actually had ordered green beans, not baked. But the ribs were amazing delicious, the sausage was not too spicy and the brisket was.. briskety? And they had pickles on the side! I adore pickles and these were fantastic.

Omgosh snow! There should be more snow tomorrow, here’s hoping! Also, I deeply regret forgetting my USB heated gloves… I actually could really use them here in Dallas…

This one is not snow- it’s carbon nanotube forests being stretched out into sheets - so nifty!

So the Sydney - Hong Kong flight was fine, watched a bunch of movies and TV shows (I liked Terminator Salvation, nowhere near as bad as some people say!). Except:

1. All of the toilets down the right side of the plane had a ‘flushing malfunction’, so there were up to 15 or more people at a time lining up the left side of the plane for the loo. That many people and the pervasive smell of fart soon filled the cabin. It waxed and waned with the amount of people waiting, but was rather unpleasant. Also, I chose to go to the loo as they were serving breakfast, so me and some elderly Tibetan woman got to play Frogger trying to get across to the other side of the plane around trolleys and people.

2. We left about 20 minutes late from Sydney, and so by the time I rushed to my connecting flight (got there with 20 minutes to spare) I was informed they had automatically transferred me to a later flight.

I am unimpressed!

The “view” from the airport… it’s all too foggy to see anything!

Leaving Australia

Miscellaneous islands!

You can see the tail end of my plane just on the left there, and Sydney in the background. There are monks on my plane! Monks! Also, Starbucks Chai Lattes are gross and the cinnamon syrup stuff burns a little….

 I know it cause I saw.

And a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong jacket.

OK so the jacket isn’t exactly long, but it is awesome. Found it in a vintage shop in Leura of all places, its so soft and sleek I love it to pieces!

Eeyyyyyy…