Monday, 9:15 p.m.

The rain came a little early this time. Usually it shoots for the Friday or Saturday of a three day weekend and continues through, but now it's only Monday evening and the showers are supposed to be infrequent and clear up by Sunday at latest.

The weather forecast is a good thing at this point. With the skies intermittently grayer and breezes encouraging the continuous stream of autumn leaves, staying inside to face physics problem sets and engineering assignments feels a little more natural. It also means that the trails at Stromlo will be a bit better next weekend; parts were getting pretty loose from the sand-like soil drying up.

I can't believe there are only two weeks (two weeks minus one day, to be exact) left of classes. It's always funny to remember your exact thoughts at points when you didn't think time was going to fly by. Not quite as funny when you remember that finals are quite so close, but I'd say that in the mixture of feelings related to the impending end of the semester, knowing I'm going to miss Canberra and wishing time would slow down just a bit is found in higher concentration than worrying about the painful days of study that will proceed exams. (Not to belittle the strange coincidence of numbers: 3 classes, 3 week exam period... Physics and Engineering finals on the same day.)

No big adventures recently, but a number of small pleasures this weekend: Night riding at Bruce Ridge with some friends. As I apparently have a bit of a jinx in picking the headlight that will die, I discovered that my one-LED headlamp from IB does for cautious night riding in a pinch! Making "pumpkin" pie afterward. "Pumpkin" refers to all types of squash here, and I've yet to see an actual pumpkin so we picked up a green one that looked promising; it was delicious nonetheless. Watching the last half of an Australian Rules Football game on campus. I've decided that AFL >> American football, by which I mean that it's actually fast-paced and enjoyable to watch, and the rules, though unique, are fairly simple to pick up. Ask me about it sometime.

And I leave you with the following Aussie words: heaps, keen, and dodgy.

Happy Trails

The above picture summarizes my weekend. It was a good one.

A mountain biker I've met here planned a bike-touring trip through part of Namadgi National Park. The plan: park one car at the entrance to Smoker's Trail, drive to the top of Pryor's Hut trail. Ride mountain bikes down through Cotter Catchement, and back up to car #1 over two days, taking small bushwalk side trips along the way and camping out for the night.

We got a bit of a late start on Saturday (the story of nearly every bike trip I've been on...), but since the first leg of the trip was very rocky but mostly downhill fire road, we covered a fair amount of distance. We even decided that the walk up to the peak of Ginninderra was worth it so I saw the Namadgi Ranges and Canberra from one of the highest points in the ACT.
Can you spot the city in the middle of the bush?

We rode till riding was no longer a safe activity (possibly a bit after that, but we wanted to find a nice place to camp!) and settled down right next to a deep-burbling creek in a clearing in the valley. It started getting chilly pretty quickly, but I was with two of the biggest outdoor-buffs you'll ever meet (seriously, they mountain bike, mountaineer, rock climb, xcounry and downhill ski, kayak, canyon, scuba dive, and who knows what else) so we fared pretty well. Sven got an awesome fire going, and I definitely took note of a few good ideas for short-term camping food ideas. It was my idea of a Saturday evening-- chatting with some pretty interesting folks, alternating between considering the fire and staring up at the stars, two of which were considerate enough to fall while I was watching. Waiting for the billy to boil!

Having gone to bed sometime between 9 and 10, I woke up pretty early, but, peeking out from under the tent (we'd just used a tent cover so that all three of us could fit under what ordinarily would have housed two quite cozily) and seeing the helmet that had been black the day before pure white, coated in the thick, crystally layer of frost like everything around it in the gray morning light, I was quite content to stay snuggled up in my borrowed sleeping and bivvy bag until more of the chill had worn off. After the sun had been hitting it for half an hour or so.

Some breakfast and repacking, then off to the next day of riding in beautiful weather. Starting off with more rolling hills and then downhill to the lowest part of the valley, we made light jokes about the impending climbs to come. The topo map showed that Smoker's Trail would be quite the quad-killer. However, when it came, we rode as much as we could, walked sections where the combined inclination and weight of our packs made keeping the front wheel down more effort than it was worth, and stopped for lunch half way up, so it wasn't too bad at all. Despite toodling along, when we hit the intersection with another hike up to Square Rock, we figured we had enough time, stashed the bikes and headed up. I didn't take a picture of the square rock (it was behind me), but this is a small section of the view!

It was downhill back to the car from there, and then came the hardest part of the weekend... waiting with the bikes for about three hours for the two who could drive manual transmissions to go and get car #2. I was just about ready to pull out my sleeping bag again as the cold set in with the dropping sun when Jasmine showed up again. We loaded up and headed back to Canberra. It doesn't look like such a small city as you approach its welcoming sprawl of winding lights at night.

Snapshot

This guy was a bit camera shy. I have a plan to do a post entirely consisting of pictures and descriptions of the awesome birds here, but as the times when I see flocks of them and times when I have my camera have been fairly independent categories, its prospects aren't looking good. Anyway, he's just one of the many cockatoos who hang out at B&G. They make a veritable racket around 6:30 am every morning, and one of them always sits and screeches about how pissed he is about getting wet every time it rains. Regardless, they're really beautiful birds, and I do a double take nearly every time I see a flock of them in a smaller-sized tree since it's branches are so covered in white that it appears out of the corner of an eye to be holding up the remainder of a snow fall or to have sprouted strange, immensely oversized blossoms.