First Month Back in Oz

I flew into Melbourne on October 14th then ran the Melbourne marathon with Alex on the 16th. We both finished, Alex's time much better than mine. I scored my personal worst at 5:29:somethingratherseconds. All was going well until about kilometer 30 (out of 42.2), then my old hip ache decided to show up. Back in Sydney a doctor said it is my IT (iliotibial) band: overstressed and tense. So ice, anti-inflamatories, and rest for a bit. I'm compromising by working on a faster 5k for a while.

After the race Alex and I went on a road trip! We drove north from Melbourne to the Oodnadatta Track and Lake Eyre, then west to Coober Pedy, south to Port Augusta, then east back to Sydney. The trip was about nine days and we covered over 2000 miles.

Starting in Melbourne and ending back in Sydney via Lake Eyre

During my bicycle trip across the US I covered just over 4000 miles. I took the long way across by covering three sides of the country instead of straight across. A road trip like this brings the size of Australia into perspective. The map looks like a little trip around the corner, but there were several days of driving through desert with just a few wild animals and no standing water anywhere. The landscape varied and changed quickly. Fruit fields turned into low desert shrubs as soon as we left the Murray river irrigation area. Two days later we were on a washboard dirt road passing between big orange sand dunes.

We traveled for several days on dirt roads and camped with the flies at night. Australia is famous for their flies and we found them en masse on the banks of Lake Eyre.

Alex and his fly friends

Lake Eyre rarely has water. When it does fill animals from all around arrive, breed, and leave. Then the lake dries back into a salt bed and awaits the next rain. It is usually three or four years between rainfalls significant enough to fill the lake and call in the critters. It was dry at the time Alex and I visited. We walked out on the salt bed and explored the crystallized rocks and bugs.

Alex on Lake Eyre

Beetle on the lake

The Alaskan avoiding sunburn

The drive back to Sydney was uneventful. We crossed back through the low desert shrubs, fruit fields, over the Blue Mountains, then into the suburbs of the big city.

Over the past few weeks I have been exploring Sydney all over again. I have also been doing boat work with with Alex and since I'm on a work visa I have been job searching. That is a blog in its own. It's a whole new experience being on the other side of the statement, "...foreigners taking away our jobs..." The "backpackers," as we are known are young, highly educated, and an entirely exploitable foreign workforce. For example: fruit-picking. Minimum wage is around $17/hour. That wouldn't be so bad except most farms offer mandatory room and board, which they deduct from wages, plus a required deposit for said room and board before work even begins. So in the end, a fruit-picker working a 40-hour week, with the (pending parliament approval) 32% backpackers income tax, ~$200 for room and board leaves us workers with about $260/week. That's about $6.50/hour and it's perfectly legal. This is in Australian dollars, so it comes to just under $4.90 in US dollars. Sadly, the United States is guilty of very much the same.

Alex sold his sailboat Berrimilla II a while back and last week we helped the new owner move her onto a new mooring up the Paramatta river. A friend of Alex's in the Ukraine was following the trip up river on one of the Sydney web cams and sent us pictures of BII and Alex's new/old sailboat BIII as we convoyed up river.

Berrimilla2 and Berrimilla3 heading up river

The weather is beautiful and Alex's cat is still cranky.

More of Ugly Bob

 More Bob pictures. I'm heading back to Australia soon and Bob is far from finished. He'll have to wait in storage until I get back.

Chines epoxied

Back hatch, seat hatches

Epoxy and fiberglass cloth drying

Bow

Sail by Brian Shilland of Shilland Sails in Sydney, Australia

Motivation

Slivers, Scabs, and a Cranky Biker

I have been hesitant to write this one. I have been working on a project and I'm starting to see a sliver of a possibility that I might actually finish it. I am building a sailboat. It's a very small sailboat though still big enough to gridlock my dad's workshop.  I am using the plans designed by John Welsford of New Zealand. He designs and sells several different wooden boat models. This one is called Houdini. Alex of Oz ordered the plans from John of NZ, they were sent from the North American office in Texas and arrived in a very large cylinder in Alaska. The boat is 14 feet long and six feet wide and will have one mast and a single mainsail. I started calling it Bob early on. As he comes along Ugly Bob has started to stick. 

 

Model Bob from back at the beginning.

An individual interior frame.

Frames aligned before mounting on the jig.

The first of about five stringers to break. This one snapped and hit me in the ribs.

Temporary interior frames to hold it all in place.

Decking and paneling.

The whole bottom is on now and I'm waiting for the epoxy to arrive in the mail.

Maps

I like maps. It occurred to me that I haven't actually posted any. Briefly, these are the routes of my bike trips. The United States took a little under six months in 2012, and New Zealand was only five weeks in late 2014.

 

For the most part, the blue marks were places I found interesting or noteworthy. Even with the sparsity of markers between Sand Diego and Dallas, I did enjoy most of it. There just wasn't much out there.

  

The red marks are the places I would have liked to reach. I ran out of time and wasn't able to explore the bottom half of the South Island. That leaves something for next time.

Back in Alaska-small update

I made it home for Christmas in December. In mid January I was offered a job a City Hall and took it. It's nice to be back working. All the traveling drains the savings account pretty quick. I am already making plans to head out again. There is more of the ocean to be explored. Robert Service wrote a poem called "Wanderlust" and it comes to mind fairly often these days.

I am training for another marathon. The last one was pretty slow, so I am trying to scape off the extra hour that really shouldn't have been there. About eight weeks left. I ran 17 miles yesterday with a couple friends. My knees are showing their age plus a few years. I have a few more long runs and lots of shorter ones on my schedule over the next two months.

Nome Sunset January 2016

Spring hit Nome about a month early this year. The ice is rotten and is starting to break off. Almost all the snow is gone and dust covers everything. Warmer weather makes running quite a bit easier. I've dropped about five pounds of cold weather gear. Running in wind pants, several top layers, and a face mask is always challenging.