The sorting hat says that I belong in Hufflepuff!

Said Hufflepuff, "I'll teach the lot, and treat them just the same."

Hufflepuff students are friendly, fair-minded, modest, and hard-working. A well-known member was Cedric Digory, who represented Hogwarts in the most recent Triwizard Tournament.

 

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I just recently returned from a trip to visit a very dear friend of mine and now fellow geocaching addict.

The following is my journal of what I did on what day, etc. :D

Day 0

I didn't get -any- sleep. I worked Monday night, delayed around after work for an hour, then dropped off my paperwork at the apartment complex. Went home and commenced packing. After I got everything sorted out, it was just about 3pm and time to go to the airport.

When I got on the flight to LAX, we were told that we were going to get there early. Good tailwinds. Cool beans, as I'd only allotted 1.5hrs layover before the Sydney flight takes off. Then came the bad news. There was some sort of gauge malfunction in one of the storage compartments and they couldn't get a temperature reading. They called maintenance to come take a look. The upside? We had an hour to burn thanks to the tailwind. OK, not too worried.

15 minutes later, more bad news. "They're performing construction on one of the airstrips at LAX and have cut power to a second airstrip. Due to LAX having only 2 available airstrips at this time, they are limiting traffic." Crap. I called Jerry and gave him a heads up and asked him to check into other flights to Sydney that were leaving. The good news? There was one on a different airline an hour after my airline was to leave. Peachy. I could pester them to move me to that if necessary. We finally got off the ground almost 2 hours late. [Oh, the compartment thing... they were unable to fix the sensor, so they moved everything out of that compartment and it was ok.]

My flight out of LAX to Sydney was scheduled to leave at 22:29. My flight from BWI hit the gate at 22:20. I got off at 22:25. THANKFULLY I was given my boarding pass and gate informantion for my next flight at BWI -and- they were in the same terminal. I sprinted in that direction. I checked the departure screen and saw my flight's gate was closed. Oh fuck. I ran up there anyway. The guy at the gate saw me coming and said "Going to Sydney? Come on, we're waiting for you." I asked about my bag and he said that it should make it onto the plane if I did. I got on, I was the last person on the flight. We still took off on time. But we'll see about the bag... I didn't really care about it that much, I wanted to make sure -I- made it to OZ.

Day 1: 9 November

At Sydney, being the last bag onto the plane meant it was the last one onto the baggage claim. But hey, it made it. I scurried off to the toilet, changed my shirt (I sweated buckets in the customs lines), and started texting Rick. He -wasn't- supposed to be awake, but I wanted to make sure he knew I'd made it to Sydney. He hadn't been able to sleep, so we wound up texting back and forth while I made my way to the domestic terminal, Quantas check-in, and sat waiting for my flight. We had to stop when he left Geraldton as outside of populated areas there are no cell towers.

Pins and needles on the flight. I tried to sleep, tried to read, tried to watch the movie. Meh.

Finally I'm off the plane at Perth. I stopped on the tunnel thing to pull a food bar out of my bag and put it in the "dump it" bin. I got through Sydney with it, but I didn't want to be stopped in the Perth airport for it, being so close. I got out into the terminal and wonder where I'm meeting Rick. Then I notice that there's people GREETING others coming off my flight. OMG - An airport that still allows visitors back into the terminal! I looked around and there he was standing off to one side, and he gave me a little wave. A big hug, a kiss, and he hands me this Koala he'd bought for me. He's already getting brownie points!

We finally got out of the airport and headed to our hotel. He'd booked a room at the Northbridge Hotel. It had jacuzzi suites. More brownie points!

We spent some time together, took a bath (my poor muscles needed that after the trip), and had dinner. Not much on the menu appealed to me (I'm picky, I don't like fish, and most of it was fish and it all had mushrooms. Ick.) We both wound up getting the same thing, but he ate the mushroom risotto off of mine as well. Hmm. He's already eating off my plate!

After dinner we were scrolling through the available movies and both wound up dozing off. Oops. Well, we were both tired and needed the sleep anyway.

Day 2: 10 November

You may want to load up photos at this point in my gallery. OZ Photos

Please feel free to leave comments on individual photos using the comment box.

We wound up taking a roundabout way out and to the road he needed for us to head to Geraldton. Almost outside of Perth we pass this chocolate place. We stopped and their chocolate was -great-. I got a box of truffles for my grandma, and we got a box for us to split. FYI: They don't have diet pepsi over there. They do have this stuff called Pepsi Light. It's close... but not quite.

On our way again, he's asking me to watch for geocaches. (He's really interested in it when I described it to him). He's been pointing out various foilage, land, etc to me during the drive. About halfway through our trip, a cache popped up, Cache It If You Can. Doesn't sound too bad, so we take the turnoff.

It was a little bit of a hike and I learned about Australian flies. Once they find you... Ick. We found the cache under this bushy plant called a "blackboy" and it was quite soggy. Rick was psyched. His first cache! Even thought it was quite wet. [Gel pens are wonderful for signing wet paper.] I took some photos and we got back onto the road. At this point we started a little tradition. Find a cache, get a kiss!

Quite eager to find another one, when I saw the next cache appear on my GPS, we took the turnoff to go find it. Yandin Breakaway

If you ever go geocaching, here's a tip. Always drive around and scout around. Don't just drive up to where you think you should get out and start trailblazing. We tried to do that in shorts. We found these plants that are like stinging nettles. [My neosporin came in handy] Giving up, we headed back to the road.

Aside from pit stops, we made two other stops for a couple of virtual caches. One was an obelisk in a port town, Where are they now?. I got a nice picture of Rick with the ocean as a backdrop. The other was a windblown tree, Windy Arbor. Photos of both in my album.

We got to Geraldton close to dinner time and we went out with Rick's flatmates Paul and Ingrid (and their international student "Frank") for dinner. Paul's boss was there as well and convo was a bit... interesting at times. I mostly just sat there, ate my dinner, leaned against Rick, and listened.

It'd been a long day, so it was time for bed.

Day 3: 11 November

I got to meet Rick's parents. Not a bad visit at all. Being my shy self, I didn't talk much, just drank my tea, ate my savories, and listened to them talk. He did ask me some questions, and pointed out I was very very pale. Umm... Maybe after the trip to Kalbarri we should have visited him again so he could see how non-pale I'd gotten.

On the way back though, we were near a cache... Not Your Run of the Mill. I asked if we could take a look. It was new, no one had found it yet, but it had a 4.5 terrain rating (5 is max and requires special equipment). He knew the area, he'd been up the top of the hill some 20 years before (drinking and partying - he had quite the tale to tell). It looked difficult but I figured what the hell, I'd like to first-to-find it.

Well... go look at the photos. I got halfway up and had to stop. Sent Rick on ahead while I rested. I was going to stay, but got lonely and tried to forge on ahead. We were following a washout along a fence. At one point the washout got deep and you had to climb out of it. Well, climbing out of it without falling backwards was hard, and I got my right leg stuck in the crevice. I got scrapes through my jeans and I turned out badly bruising my leg. I opted to stay right there and contented myself with some photo taking.

Rick didn't find the cache up top... there was some snakeskin in the cave and he was leery about reaching in. So we climbed back down. He's going to go back some other time with gloves.

Um, I don't really remember what we did for the rest of the day. I do have a nice photo of the resident cat, Chilli, attacking my foot.. He got tired of gnawing on my shoelace and then went after my ankle. After that I'm not quite sure.

Day 4: 12 November

There was a BBQ in my honor that evening, but we had the morning and most of the afternoon to work with. So we went down to a petting zoo in Greenough, with the intention of snagging a couple of caches on the way back.

The zoo, well.. We got a thing of feed each so we could feed the animals. Just page through the photos. Not much extra to tell except that I hate the wire used for the cages, made it impossible to get good photos. I'm trying to get bird identification out of Rick. I passed on a Dingo "cuddle" for $5. And feeding the kangaroos was loads of fun.

When we left, I got a couple photos of the bridge that collapsed. The bridge was built by convicts years ago. During their wet season, the area flooded and it damaged the bridge. [You really can't tell it flooded, I mean, the detour around the bridge involves just going down the little hill and around it.] Signs were posted stating the bridge was unsafe, but some moron felt it was and drove across it anyway... and the bridge collapsed under him. Dork.

On the way back to town, we stopped off at a couple of caches. The first was a nice short walk (uphill) that ended at a gazebo on the top of a hill, Down By The River. Nice photo op. The other was on the beach a little farther north, SKP-001. The river ended at a sandbar at the beach, so we walked across the sandbar to get to the little island area the cache was on. I took a photo of a "snail bush".

Afterwards it was time for the BBQ, so we headed back to town. It was great fun. I got to meet the rest of Rick's friends, including a couple I'd sort of known before... They'd been in my raid in WoW before they transferred to another server. So I met some interesting folk, proved the rumor that all americans are loud and obnoxious false, and played some poker. Rick's WoW friends also invited us to a BBQ at their place the next night.

Day 5: 13 November

We had the BBQ at Mick's that night, but what to do with the day? Geocaching!

We worked on a multicache (Marina Delight) at the Geraldton Marina, it was a piece of cake. I tried to get a photo of a crab, but I couldn't zoom in close enough and he moved. >.< I did get some photos of some interesting stone sculptures.

The other cache we went to was a virtual, The Rest Is Silence. It was a memorial to the HMAS Sydney, which was lost 19 November 1941 off the coast of Australia during an encounter with a German raider, the HSK Kormoran. 645 lives were lost on the Sydney and neither ship was ever found. [For more about the memorial itself, visit http://www.hmassydney.com.au/home.html.]

What to do now?

Well... We just so happened to be overlooking a shopping mall. And it was lunchtime. AND it happened to be the mall where Rick's flatmate Paul worked. So we went there for some grub, entertainment, and to wander around Target. [In Target I was a bit domestic and helped Rick pick out a new shirt...]

Afterwards we grabbed some supplies to take to the BBQ at Mick's and went back to Rick's for a little freshening up before the BBQ. At Mick's it turned out to be just us, and we had some fun shooting pool and eating food. It got late and we were to go to Kalbarri the day, so we headed back to Rick's.

Day 6: 14 November

We wound up falling asleep later than planned, then I woke up with the sorest throat possible. I could barely talk. Back to sleep with me, we'd do Kalbarri the next day. I told Rick I'd been doing too much deep throating. *evil grin*

I finally crawled out of bed around lunchtime. I felt better and could speak. Not to let the rest of the day go to waste, we showered and went out.

I got this "American Hotdog" for lunch which was this long frankfurter with ham, onions, ketchup, mustard, and probably some other stuff I don't remember on it. Never seen a hot dog like that here. I ate about half of it and now that I think of it, the other half may still be under the seat in his car... Gross.

So we went looking for this multicache (Shine On Me) along the beach. It started near a spot called "Seperation Point" on what the locals call the "back beach". This was the beach we were planning to go to on Thursday. We scoured the area pretty hard, but were unable to locate the first stage of the cache. We did find a "lighthouse" which was a shower! Pretty nifty seeing as how the real lighthouse was barely visible off into the distance. [I posted a Did Not Find on the cache and was told that the first stage is still there, but well camoflagued. I thought we did a pretty good job of looking for it w/o trashing the sand and vegetation looking for it.] We did drive up near the lighthouse later, but for some reason I forgot to take a photo. The lighthouse is actually next to the restaurant I had dinner at my first night in Geraldton.

After that we drove out town to find a couple of outlying caches. On the way to the first one, we stopped at a random lookout called "Bringo" and I snapped a few shots of the area. Lookouts are fairly common, but I never get tired of seeing the different landscapes from each one.

Totally missing the cache subject alluded to in the cache name (Addicted to Caching #3 - Gotta Secret????), we drove past the turn off for the Aussie Spy site. After a K or so down the road, I reread the title, had a d'oh moment, and we turned around and headed over there. Right before the entrance to the site, there's a turnoff up a hill with the sign that says "public lookout". These guys have their very own lookout where you can look down into the valley at their installation! We compared the view to the sign and noted that there's a missing golf ball down there. Then we wandered off the path and found the cache. Afterwards Rick started poking one of the little "divets" in the trail. I took a photo of one. Apparently an insect makes these holes in an ant trail, then hides in the hole, waiting for unsuspecting ants to walk over and become dinner.

Rather than driving back to the highway and taking the faster route to the wind farm (which is where our other cache was), we took the back roads through Australian farmland. The scenery was very nice. I did not take any photos, but I marvelled over how the terrain and ground cover and color can change so drastically. Near the wind farm was the Ellendale Pool. We stopped to take a look. I was going to wander over and take some photos, but the sign warning about Bacterial Meningitis in the water really creeped me out, so I stayed in the car and we headed for the wind farm. Nasties in the water aside, it was a very peaceful spot for a picnic or just relaxing with a book.

The Wind Farm. Have I mentioned it's windy there? Very windy? The windmills are freaking HUGE. GREEN -OUGH POWER - not so huge.

We were done being out and about for the day, so we rented a couple of movies to watch. X-Men 2 & 3.

Day 7: 15 November

Time for Kalbarri! Up bright and early, we left at 7am.

We took the coastal route up and on the way stopped at this old Convict Hiring depot in Lynton. There was a cache here as well, Lead to Lynton - Convict History. We perused the ruins, I signed the visitor's book using my maiden name, found and logged the geocache, and made a friend in the form of a small dog. There was a second part of the ruins, but I was feeling pretty hungry and so we decided to head for Port Gregory. In retrospect, we probably could have found something to eat at the Lynton Homestead. Oh well.

Port Gregory... Is quiet. Very quiet. The shop we stopped at had just opened. We ate our sandwiches in the car and just listened to the sound of... silence. No cars, no people. What a sleepy town.

Outside of Port Gregory is the Hutt Lagoon. The Hutt Lagoon is for salt harvesting and has an interesting secondary export.

The water of the lagoon is PINK. That's right. PINK. That is due to an algae known as Dunaliella Salina that lives in very salty water. An algae farm harvests the algae and extracts beta carotene from it. The next time you take your beta-carotene supplement, think that it may have come from this pink water in Australia.

We left Port Gregory, hung a left, and headed north along the coast to Kalbarri.

We -really- should have stopped at all of the little coastal roads. Rick offered to, but I had a one track mind and geocaches was it. We did stop at one, Pot Alley, b/c it had an interesting name.

After Pot Alley, we headed for that cache I was so intent upon finding, Easy Bluff. It was at the top of a bluff. You could park your car on rock at the bottom and then climb up to find the cache. Cake. We sat up there a bit and just watched the waves, and I took some photos.

It was about this point, as we headed north towards the town, that I realized that my left arm was a little warm, and that the sun was shining onto it, my left thigh, and the left side of my face. We'd forgotten to get sunscreen when at Target a few days before. And we KEPT FORGETTING TO GET IT.

We drove through town, much opportunity to stop and get my fair fragile skin protection, but it totally blew out of our minds.

We headed for Meanarra Hill once through town. I took a bunch of photos, missed seeing a Kangaroo, and we found the cache, Meanarra Hill.

Afterwards we started to head back to town for sunscreen and to play minigolf when Rick remembered he wanted to show me Nature's Window. "Want to go now?" "Sure."

To get to Nature's Window, it requires a 25km drive. With my arm in the sun.

So we took the road into the park. It was badly rutted and the surface was mostly sand. After driving for awhile, we got to a T intersection. Left was "the Loop" and right was "Z-bend". "Z-bend" had a cache with a 4.5 terrain rating near it. I was tempted, but the last 4.5 terrain cache hurt me... What Rick wanted to show me was on the loop, so we turned left.

There was a turn off before Nature's Window for a lookout, so we stopped there and I snapped some photos of the Murchison River. Note: If you want you could walk right off the edge. Why do I get the feeling that if it was in the USA, there would be a substantial guardrail for it?

Getting back onto the road, we headed for Nature's Window. The carpark for the trail was busy busy. We found ourselves a spot and I noted that we really should have gone back to town before this and gotten more water. Crap. We did the walk anyway. Didn't look that hard. [It was a bit of an incline on the way back...]

It was a bit of a thrill when the trail ended and we started walking on rock. Here, a misstep could send you tumbling off the edge. I kept my footing and we made it over to Nature's Window.

It was really neat. I took photos through it, a photo of the rock formation, photos of the river from around the formation, etc, etc. We weren't the only people there and after a short rest under an overhang, we got some people to take a photo of Rick and I sitting in the Window.

The trail actually continued down the rock face to the river, but we did not do that. Neither of us are in the best of shape, and I'd already come down wrong on my ankle. I did not come to OZ to die. We also did not have much water on us, so we headed back to the car. We decided then that rather than going to Z-Bend, the best would be to head into town, get sunscreen for my crisping skin, rehydrate, and get lunch.

All that obtained, we went to play some mini-golf.

Ok... you know what? I suck at mini-golf. It'd been 10 years or so since I'd played, but I've always had fun. It was... interesting. The course was simple. On the 3rd hole I knocked my ball out of the green, but it bounced, hit some rocks, and bounced back INTO the green. Cool beans. On several holes it took me close to 10 strokes to get it in. I had to fix my score later to reflect the 6 stroke limit...

At the 13th hole, I made a comment about the hole being all about vectors, hit the ball, and got a HOLE IN ONE! Yay! I was not as lucky for the other 5 holes, but hey, can't be lucky all of the time, eh? In the end, Rick won. We treated ourselves to ice cream (Rick tricked me into trying his nasty coffee flavored stuff), saw a little lizard, and we headed back to Geraldton.

I was crispy.

I should have taken a photo, but I burned my left cheek, ear, side of neck and shoulder, left thigh-top was a bit pink, and my left forearm was a dark red. My right side was just a touch pink.

Crap. Well, we got a couple more movies at the video store (Garfield and Aeon Flux) and decided the rest of the night should be indoors. And depending on how bad my burn turned out to be, we'd decide if we were going to the beach the next day.

Day 8: 16 November

OMG. I was crispier than I thought.

We cancelled the beach and opted for some movies. Paul had Star Wars 2 & 3, which I hadn't seen yet, so Rick pulled them out so we could watch them in the afternoon. We went out for some food, grabbed a quickie cache (Close to Home), and headed back to the house to watch SW2.

I then had the fantastic idea that I would like to go to the beach, if only to wade in the water and collect seashells. It was close to sunset, so it shouldn't be that bad...

Hahahaha.

We did have a nice walk along the beach, I got some seashells, took some photos. I also got something else.

More sunburn.

I obviously had not learned yet. You do not fuck with ozzie sun.

But after the beach, we grabbed some dinner, or "food for tea" as Rick refers to it, and headed back to watch SW3.

Day 9: 17 November

Time to head to Perth.

Remember that cache (Yandin Breakaway) about midway that we tried on the way up? Well, we tried it again on the way back down. This time we drove a little farther down the road, lo and behold! There was a track on the left, mere meters from where we'd stopped! That track took you within spitting distance of the cache. Some more photos taken.

We were spending the night at a resort in Joondalup, so we headed straight there, opting not to head to any caches on the way. After checking in, I felt dizzy and lightheaded. I shouldn't have been, seeing as how I'd been sucking down a bottle of Coke earlier. [FYI: Coke in OZ tastes like it's SUPPOSED to here. Like it used to, before they did something weird and it has that nasty ass bite.]

I had one of those $3 candy bars, felt better, so we ran out and grabbed dinner. We felt a little funny walking our Mc Donalds into the pricey resort, but hey, after a long drive, we didn't feel too interested in anything else.

Afterwards, I had an itchy spot on my thigh. I didn't think much of it, it looked like I'd scraped the top off a hair follicle bump. But it was sooooo itchy. So I looked a little closer. Fuck me. It was a tick! He'd probably been there since our stop for that geocache midday. No wonder I was crashing earlier. A quick check of Rick turned up one on him as well, in a near identical location on his thigh.

Our blood suckers removed, we opted to go to a nearby lake for some caches (Neil's Front Yard & Lookout). Pretty nice, uneventful. After the caches we went to look at the waterfowl. Lots of seagulls, ducks, black swans, a bird I don't know. There was also a magpie and a kookaburra back in the trees. I tried very hard to get a clear photo of the kookaburra, but he was a little too high up.

As we left, a pair of adult roos graced us with their and their babies presence. My batteries were dying so the photos didn't turn out well.

Day 10: 18 November

Last Day.

After checkout we drove around a bit, dropped by a couple of caches (I AM STUFFED & Jaggie and the Ferocious Bush), then drove in the general direction of the airport. Still way too early for us to be there, we passed and Rick took us in the direction of Armadale. After driving through, we headed for the Canning Dam. We attempted a cache there (Hideout in the Hills), but were unable to locate it. We did get to walk across the dam. At one point you could drive across the dam, but access was gated off and from the looks of previous logs, had been so for awhile. I snapped some photos.

After dinner, we headed for the airport. It was about 6pm and my flight was scheduled for 1155pm. Can't check-in until 855pm, so we had to entertain ourselves. I tried to take some photos of Rick, but the batteries were once again dying. Both being excellent tic-tac-toe players, we played that wretched dot game, then 'vacation hangman'. [The last photo, my comment is b/c that morning he asked me if he should shave, then opted not to. That's my answer. ]

After check-in, we went up to the terminal and just sat there together. I had promised him I wouldn't cry, as if I did, he would too, so I tried to stay strong. I waited until the last call to board, and he watched until he could no longer see me.

I really didn't want to leave. And it will be at least 6 months before we can touch each other again. :(