Women Over Fifty

I’ve never been sure how many sailing boats Annie has at any one time.  I know the number was around five (including a motor boat) when she was offered the Fury.  The picture is of Annie, taken in Queensland.  She just loves boats, whether sailing around in Precious or scooting around in the bay with Megan her Australian Shepherd in the little dinghy she named the Hot Yot, she is a happy lady.  She is called the Scuz Mum of the ScuzBums and editor of their newsletter.  The ScuzBums are a group of people who build, and/or admire small boats.

Annie is also a plein-air painter, specializing in painting small boats at wooden boat festivals and other marine scenes.  So, she was no stranger to wooden boats when a man in Oregon wrote to her via the ScuzBum Newsletter inquiring if anyone would like to own an old wooden skiff.

Here she is with her husband sailing her boat Precious in San Diego Bay.  If she isn’t out sailing, she’s probably sitting on one of her boats with one of her Aussie dogs.

Annie called the man about the skiff, thinking she wanted to tell a little more about the boat before she placed the ad in the newsletter.

They hit it off and the man decided that Annie should have the skiff.  The man was getting older and he was not able to take the skiff out on the water any longer.  It had been in storage for 20 years.  He wanted to give it to someone who would love and care for as much as he did.

He decided to give the boat to Annie.  Annie insisted she had plenty of boats but he insisted that she was the one.  It wasn’t just a matter of giving it to her.  There was the matter of driving from San Diego to Oregon to get the boat, trailer it home,  and find a place to park it when she got it here.  You will remember she was living in a town-house-complex with two parking spaces for each house and no hanging out into the road.

Though the man assured Annie that the skiff was in good shape, she could imagine what she’d find - a once wonderful skiff that had been sitting around in storage for twenty years with rot and neglect all over.  Annie wasn’t sure she wanted to take it on.  But - by now you should know how Annie feels about sail boats.  She says she felt a strange compulsion - like the boat wanted her to own it and to take it out in the water again.

After gaining her husband’s approval (How ever did she do that?) Annie set out for Oregon with her dog Meggie for company, driving the more than a thousand miles up the Pacific Coast to Oregon.

Here’s a picture of Annie and Meggie in the Hot Yot.  Annie painted the boat herself.

So Annie and Meggie headed north along the coast sometimes visiting with friends, sometimes stopping to explore the beaches, and eventually arriving in Oregon, a little nervous about seeing the skiff.

Annie loved the skiff on sight.  It had an unusual construction and it was in exceptional condition.  This old man, named Elmer, had certainly loved and cared for it.  He showed her how to get it ready for sailing while Annie tried hard to memorize everything.  It was a fine boat - an exceptional boat to just have given to you.  Annie didn’t take it home right away.  She had to learn how to sail it.

More tomorrow.

Marilynne

Thanks for Roz of Life in Australia for awarding me with the Life is Grand Award.  Does she feel bad because I lost my credit cards in Australia?  Think of all the shopping I missed.

I am supposed to list five reasons why I think life is grand:

1. Life is grand because I have a loving family and many friends.
2. Life is grand because I blog with people who aren’t trying to cut me off at the knees and therefore be the best in the competition.  The people I blog with are interesting, supportive, genuinely nice people.  Life is grand because we know each other.
3. Life is grand because the sun is shining and the weeds are growing so fast the bunnies can’t keep up with them.  (Our wild bunnies just love the broad bladed weeds.)
4. Life is grand because my computer takes me out into the world every day and I love it.
5. Life is grand because I love my readers, and apparently they like what I write enough to stop by often.

Now I need to award the Life is Grand symbol to the following people.  I’m going to list some blogs you might not know because I think you might like them.

1. The Skiff Song Web site because Annie has such a great story to tell and you’d like to hear it.
2. The Mysterious Galaxy online because independent book stores cater to your tastes and this book store caters to mine.  This award is for all the independent book stores out there.
3. Yahoo News for their article “Can Web site offer homeless man hope?” for great reporting on a problem none of us understand.  Look at the videos to get the full effect.
4. To Animation vs Animator for a fine sense of fun that he shares with us all.
5. To Peace Love and Happiness who just puts out a good blog.

I hope you enjoy visiting these blogs and web sites.  I know it’s unusual to include web sites, but it’s what I wanted to do today.

Marilynne

Annie herself has agreed to tell us the story about her boat:  how she came to own it and what she did with it.  You’ll enjoy the adventure, but today she needs to celebrate her husband’s birthday.

I met Annie when I was living in a townhouse in San Diego.  She and her husband lived in the unit on the end just two houses down.  People liked living in this place and many had bought their townhome new and still lived there.  Annie and her husband had been the new ones until we arrived.

Annie loves Australian shepherds.  Her dog Meggie was so charming that I absolutely fell in love with her.  Meggie has passed on, but she has owned many Australian shepherd dogs, some of which she rescued from the pound.

Annie loves boats.  She spent many hours on her little boat Precious, a small wooden sailboat, painting, polishing, and enjoying just being on the water.   The boat above is the Fury, the boat that’s featured in her story.  Let’s just let Annie tell her story to us - sorry, it will have to be tomorrow.

Marilynne

I didn’t take a lot of pictures in Melbourne because I was upset.  We were in a hotel in Melbourne and I couldn’t pay the bill.  I had lost our Visa Card - probably in Cairns.   My husband had a Visa Card, but he wasn’t there at the moment.  I had agreed to register us at the motel and he was elsewhere taking care of other business.

The hotel kindly let us have our room and I sat on the bed taking apart first my purse, then our luggage, one piece at a time.  No matter how many times I went through it, the little case with my plastic cards wasn’t there.

I was devastated!  I just don’t make mistakes like that.  Ever.  Also missing were my drivers license, my ATM cards, and my phone cards.  What a disaster!

Facing my husband and telling him I’d made a stupid mistake was really hard.  Instead of joining my self-flagellation, he just searched for himself, then helped me decide what to do.

First we called Visa.  They had an office in Melbourne for which I was grateful, but it was Friday evening and they were closed until Monday.  Still, there was a person there to talk to me.  “Do you have enough cash to last until Monday.” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “but we have to pay the hotel bill and I’ve only got my husband’s Visa card.  If you cancel it now, we won’t be able to use it for the hotel.”

“Go to the desk and pay for as many nights as you need.” she said while taking the hotel’s information.  I’ll allow that to go through.  Then your card will be canceled and you won’t be able to use it.”  She took a list of the places we knew we had used the card.  Then she told us a new card would be ready on Monday.

“We’re flying out on Monday.” I told her.  “We’ll probably be OK until we get home.”  So, it was agreed that they would send us a new Visa card once they knew we were home.  Each bill for a few months would contain charges that we knew we had made, and another list of charges they thought were probably fraudulent.  They were trusting us to be fair about what we had charged and what we had not.  What a relief!  I could tell we weren’t the first travelers who had lost a credit card.  And how nice!  We never saw an unauthorized charge on that card.

So, we knew we had enough money to eat on, the hotel bill would go on the Visa, and we could also charge meals in their restaurant to our hotel bill.  We were left with enough money, but not a lot extra.  The first thing we cut out was the tour we had booked to see the fairy penguins.  AWWWWW!!!  It hurt.

Our motel was downtown and on the downtown bus line.  The bus was free or a dollar, I don’t remember which.  So, we knew we could go around on the bus and see Melbourne’s downtown.  With a little walking, we also were able to see the Royal Botanical Gardens (not the proper title, but close).  Not having the credit card slowed us down and we saw things we wouldn’t have spent a lot of time on.  Like the Botanical Gardens.  They were lovely.  They were full of things Australian, and therefore interesting to a tourist’s eyes.  Somewhere in the center of the gardens was a tea house, of sorts, where I remember having a wonderful salad and, you’ve got it, Devonshire Tea.  It was a strange lunch, but we were leaving Australia soon and I granted myself this indulgence.

We were hearing a lot of noise in one part of the gardens and seeing birds fly up in great numbers.  What was going on there?  It was a very fragrant part of the gardens.  You can contribute that to the large number of fruit bats, not birds, that were trying to sleep through the afternoon.  The children would wait until the bats settled down, hanging upside down in the trees.  Then they would run through the trail making a great deal of noise.  The bats would fly up out of the trees where we could get a good look at them, then settle down again until the children wanted to wake them up.  You’d think the bats would just find another home, wouldn’t you, but apparently they liked living there.

Another time, I took the free bus and  just got off when I saw something coming up that I wanted to see.  That’s how I came to be inside the library.  It was starting to rain and I wanted to go somewhere inside.  A big library seemed like an ideal place.

It was flat out gorgeous.  The architecture, itself, was old English style with a lofty rotunda, lots of carvings, lots of books, and awe inspiring views from every perch.  It’s the kind of a library where you whisper and try to walk quietly.  I wasn’t allowed to take pictures there, so you’ll have to go see the library in downtown Melbourne if you have a chance.

As a part of the library, or close to it, there was a museum.  I paid my small fee and went in to look.  It was as wonderful as the library but in a different way.  I was drawn to an exhibit where aborigine elders had told their stories into tape recorders.  Their voices were there to hear for all generations.  I heard an aborigine version of the invasion of Australia by Japan.  I had no idea Japan had done this.  The story was mixed up with other happenings in this woman’s life and so the time line was non existent.  It was just how she remembered things.  The part of her story that I remember was a telling of how they had repelled the Japanese invaders by tricking them.  True?  I don’t know, but it was interesting to hear the stories.

Another stop on the bus line was at a great indoor shopping center that was built around an old building of some sort.  It was fun to go through the shops, and not so fun to be without my credit card and afraid to spend much money.  I finally saw Coogi sweaters in cotton instead of wool.  I really wanted that sweater, but I couldn’t spend the money.  I mourned that sweater for months, until I began seeing a cheap version in the US.  That cured me.

Soon we were back on our Quantas airplane  headed for home via New Zealand.  We had been visiting for a month and we were ready to go home.  It was frustrating to know that we had seen only a small part of Australia.  When I said this to a neighbor back home, she asked what took us so long.  She had “seen” Australia and New Zealand in two weeks on a tour.

Personally, I wish we could return as see more.

• I’d like to drive the road along the southern coast of Australia.
• If not the road, take the train across the southern part
• I’d like to see Darwin
• I’d like to see Perth
• I’d like to see Brisbane
• I’d like to see my friend Annie’s wooden boat in the maritime museum in Brisbane.  I know the story about that boat and I’ll tell you more about Annie’s boat tomorrow.

Marilynne

P.S.  The waterfall is the one we saw on our trip south of Cairns.  The sign we saw in Coober Pedy.

We rented a car and drove south from Cairns in search of the shy wild cassowaries.  Here’s a picture of one from the crocodile farm.  We were told we could see them on a certain highway about twilight.  So we took off driving on the left side of the road and getting hopelessly boggled on the traffic circles.  Fortunately there isn’t a lot of traffic on those roads, at least not on that day.

We had lots of time and decided to stretch our legs and have a look at a waterfall advertised in our tour book.  I should note here that even though we brought tour books with us, the ones we could pick up for free in the hotels were just as good and more up to date.

The waterfall was in rain forest and guess what?  It was raining.  Still, the greenery overhead offered us some shelter from the rain.  The path was deserted and there was nothing in the air but the sound of turkeys.  Turkeys?  Yes, there in the underbrush we saw any number of wild turkeys who seemed curious as to whether we would feed them, or maybe just curious.

We were pretty wet by time we found the waterfall, but it was worth it.  The waterfall was full and lovely and a good goal for two tourists looking for something not in the tour books.  Maybe we were in the mood to discover something about Australia for ourselves.

Back in the car and warm we decided to find something to eat.  Not that there was an eatery to be seen on most of that stretch of road.  We drove towards the ocean and found a little town and some food.  Then we went walking along the beach.  We saw the most extraordinary little creatures.  I never really saw more than a bit of them as they came up out of their hole and deposited a bit of sand outside, then disappeared again.  Their holes and little sand piles made circles in the sand.  They almost looked like aborigine drawings - the ones made of circles and spots.  You can see these in the header.

Soon it was time to look for cassowaries.  As night came on us, we searched the roadsides for the elusive cassowaries.  We just knew they would turn up, but they didn’t.  Not a one.  We were so disappointed.

I inserted the picture of the kangaroo just so you could see how big they can get.  That’s a small boy looking at him.

We drove back to Cairns in the dark.  Pitch black dark.  At one point my husband stopped the car, turned out the lights and told me to get out of the car.  Puzzled, I did so.  Then he pointed upwards.  There was the whole southern sky so bright and beautiful with jillions of stars I’d never seen before.  We discovered the southern cross, but we didn’t know the names of the others.   It was like being inside the Milky Way there were so many stars.

On the way back, we talked about how my husband, the land surveyor who never got lost anywhere, was always getting lost in Australia.  His sense of direction was awful.  It was pathetic.  I had always relied on him to know the way because he usually did.  He has lead me out into the bleak Mojave Desert until I could see no landmark, no building, no highway, nothing, and he would unfailingly direct us back to the road and our car.  I trust him to be able to do that.  His brain seems to work on different information than mine.

Now he was always getting lost in Australia and that bothered us both a good deal.   We wondered if he could sense magnetic north, and now it was magnetic south.  We wondered if it was because the ocean was east of us instead of west.  We wondered if the stars had something to do with it.  We had no answers.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Melbourne.  It’s one of Australia’s English looking towns.

Marilynne

I must tell you that my most indulgent pleasure while traveling in Australia was having Devonshire Tea.  This simple delight is not available where I live, but it was available all over Australia.  It was often served as a quick food.  Well, I don’t know if you could go so far as to call it food.  Perhaps you could if you served it with fresh berries instead of jam.

This  delight is shortcake biscuit, berry jam (usually raspberry jam) and a cream over the top that I wonder might be clotted cream.  Perhaps Roz will tell us.  The cream is wonderfully rich and not at all sweet.

Devonshire Tea is served biscuit on the bottom, then a layer of jam, then the clotted cream on top.  You don’t have to eat it with tea.  You can have it with coffee if you like.  Anything else, and to me you haven’t got Devonshire Tea.

In the picture, I’m sitting in a boat, motoring around a lake on the tablelands above Cairns and having my Devonshire Tea.  It was so common for me to do this in Australia that my hubbie just had to take a picture.

Somewhere near Cairns we also came into contact with a crocodile farm.  In Australia, crocodiles are raised for meat.  However, they keep a few penned to entertain the tourists.

I stuck my camera lens through a hole in the fence so I wouldn’t have fencing in front of my picture.  It is a little unnerving to be so near to a croc and know he’s hungry.  You can see, the person feeding the croc is making certain that the croc understands that the chicken is his dinner, not the person feeding him.

After this death-defying feat we walked around the farm to see pens full of crocodiles in all sizes from babies on up.  (I’m surprised we didn’t also see a chicken ranch.)  We also saw emus, ostriches, and cassowaries as well as a few kangaroos.  I know the emus, ostriches and kangaroos are also raised as food, but I think the cassowaries were there just so we could admire them.  They are similar to an emu or an ostrich in that they’re a big gawky bird with gorgeous feathers and other parts so ugly you wonder how they get along.

Tomorrow we’ll see what else I remember about our trip.  I am amazed that I remember so much.  The pictures help.

Marilynne

Kuranda is a place I’d never heard of until we looked through the brochures at our hotel in Cairns.  (Notice, I’m now spelling it correctly.  Apologies.)  We booked the tour and a bus came to get us at our hotel.  First we boarded the Kuranda Railway which is the scenic way to Kuranda.  Our guide went home for lunch and met us later at a pickup point. The Kuranda train is an historic open-air train that goes from Cairns to the mountain town of Kuranda.  It was very different from Cairns.

We took a jillion pictures of green things, which just came out looking very green.  Here’s one of the train itself and of some scenery along the way.

Most of the scenery was spectacular.  The train slowly crawled up the mountain side allowing ample time for picture taking.

While in Kuranda, our guide advised us to get some lunch and to see the aborigine show there.  This is one place where the aborigines are willing to talk about their life and allow themselves to be photographed.  The aborigine giving the show said that they are a shy people and would prefer to just be ignored and allowed to go their own way.  He also played the didgeridoo for us and showed us how to play it.  It sounded much better when he was playing it and a little lonely.

At the market, this singer was having such a good time with her guitar and her wreath of flowers in her hair.  I have her picture because I was struck by how much she looked like me and how different she was in personality.  It was like seeing your own doppleganger.

The last picture is of the market at Kuranda.  It’s tourist heaven for sure.  So many neat things to buy to bring home.

I’m having a little trouble controlling the spacing of the pictures so be patient with me.

There was a wonderful variety of unique crafts and clothing.  It was so fun to wander through the shops.  I guess I was feeling better.

When our guide picked us up in Kuranda, we returned to Cairns by way of the table lands.  It was another, totally different environment.  Here there were farms of sugar cane, a farmer’s fruit stand, a huge curtain fig that hand roots hanging down to the ground from branches high in the tree.

We took a boat trip on a lake there, but I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

Marilynne

If you want some nice pictures of the Great Barrier Reef check out this URL.  Neither of us went underwater to take pictures, but there are some lovely pictures on Google pictures.

I was still fighting an upper respiratory infection, but I wasn’t going to not see the Great Barrier Reef.  This was a big important DO on our list of things Australian.  The Great Barrier Reef is huge.  It hugs the eastern coast of Australia like a great arm and it varies how far from the coast it is and how much water is over the reef.  There are places near Brisbane where a child could walk out on the reef to have a look.  This is what I pictured.  Walking out on the reef in sneakers and a sun hat to see what I could see.  I was also prepared to snorkel if I could put my foot on the sand and stand up and have my head above water.

We reserved a place on a charter boat out of Cairns.  It was an all day trip, lunch included.  We were so excited.  We were wearing our bathing suits.  We were ready to go.

As we traveled toward the Great Barrier Reef the ocean became more and more choppy.  I am not a good sailor at the best of times and I worried about getting sea sick - especially since my head was stuffy already - it’s a matter of balance, I understand.  We were taken away from these thoughts by a good lunch of sandwiches and salads.  While we were still seated the crew began to talk about the visit to the Great Barrier Reef.  They said that only so many people are allowed to visit any particular spot each day.  The tour boats all had places staked out where they brought their boats.  Unfortunately, the tour we were on had not been in business long and so did not have the best choice of spots.

They reassured us that we would get a good look at the reef, but said we would have to go in the water to see it.  They had aboard scuba tanks for those certified to scuba dive.  They also had snorkels and would teach anyone who wanted to how to snorkel and to supervise them in the water.

I looked out over the choppy water.  I didn’t want my first time snorkeling to be in that water and out of the sight of land, no matter how great the view would be.  My husband, who is like a fish in the water, stood in line for snorkeling lessons.  When he came back he encouraged me to try it.  “They’ll give you a life preserver to hold on to.” he said.  I was backing away so fast it’s a wonder I was still on the boat.

So, off he went on an adventure and I was left on the boat with nothing to see but water.  He was quickly back and sputtering.  The snorkel he’d been given was defective and his first indrawn breath using it was just water.  There was a hole in it.

The crew apologized and promised to personally inspect the next snorkel if he wanted to try again.  He did and soon he was snorkeling away with everyone else.

Once the crew had everyone in the water who was willing to go, they told us they had a glass-bottomed boat and would take the rest of us out on that if we wanted to go.  I was saved!

I did go out on the glass bottomed boat.  That’s it away from the boat in the first picture.  It opened a magical world with giant clams and colorful fish.  We were assured that you had to travel to where the water was this deep to see some of these things.  They didn’t live in shallow water.

When he tired, my husband came back to tell me about the wonders he’d seen.  “Ask them.”  he said. “Maybe they’ll let you go out for a little while.”  But I had seen how deep the water below us was.  I wanted no part of it.  My husband was thoroughly satisfied and said he’d do it again if he had the chance.  Here’s a picture of him swimming away from the boat.  The white in the corner is a boat platform.

The crew threw him a life preserver and one of them went with him to be sure there was no repetition of the previous problem.  Because he was guided by a crew member he saw things he might not have seen by himself.

The remains of our lunches fed the fish.  It’s like chumming except that the purpose is to lure the fish to that spot so people can see them, not as fisherman might do to lure the fish to them so they can catch them.

An amazing variety of sea life lived over the Great Barrier Reef.  It was definitely worth the time and money, even if I didn’t get to walk on it and look.  We particularly loved seeing the giant clams.  We knew they existed, but seeing them ourselves made them ever so real.

The water was choppier as we returned home.  A lot of people were getting sick and running to the rail to feed the fish.  I felt sick, but I was determined not to join them.  I felt better being outside in the air and looking at the horizon.  That’s how the first picture came to be.  I was standing there for most of the ride home and didn’t disgrace myself.  I was proud.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about our trip to Karanda and another bit of public transportation.

Marilynne

Cairns was like home:  warm and full of flowers.  I think I have a picture of every kind of flower I saw in Cairns.  I was still sick, so we took a hotel with a balcony overlooking the bay.  I spent quite a bit of time just sitting there watching the clouds go by.  My husband kept teasing me out a bit.  He’d say “Let’s go for a walk.  When you get tired, we can come home.”  So we’d set out on foot.  He was clever at choosing a destination that interested me, like the shopping center that was on the pier where you could also get a boat out to the Great Barrier Reed.

It rained in Cairns every morning, and spent the afternoon steaming it off.  Yes, it was humid.  I didn’t mind.  I didn’t have any energy anyway.

We were excited by the prospect of finally seeing the Great Barrier Reef.  When we saw it on a map, we could tell it circled close to most of Eastern Australia.  We didn’t know what to choose, so Cairns sounded the most interesting.  More about that trip tomorrow.

I wandered listlessly around the shopping mall. It was hard to be interested in anything.  I just wanted to go back to bed.  Then I found a little shop that sold knits.  I was attracted to the t-shirts that had eucalyptus leaves silk screened on them.  (They call eucalyptus trees gum trees in Australia.)  The T-shirts reminded me of home in San Diego because we also have eucalyptus trees everywhere.  (We imported them from Australia.)  The clever sales girl started pulling out clothing for me to see.  I didn’t have to do much more than say “Yes” I liked it, or “No.”  Soon I was looking at a silk shirt that matched the T-shirts.  She said I could wear the shirt over the tee.  I love silk shirts and these were not horribly expensive.  I was thinking of buying the shirt.  But then, she pulled out a gored skirt and showed me how they went together.  I loved the combo, and that’s how I came to buy one of my favorite souvenirs: a three-piece matching outfit.  They looked comfortable, and I looked forward to wearing it.

While I was shopping my husband was searching for a ship to take us to the Great Barrier Reef.  When we met at a restaurant he showed me the brochures.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out to sea, but I certainly didn’t want to go home without seeing this wonder.  He booked it, then we took a rickshaw home.  Yes, I said a rickshaw.  It was driven by a young man who was saving for college.  I quite enjoyed the trip.

Here’s the view from the hotel balcony.

Back at the hotel, we also picked up a brochure for Karanda in the mountains west of Cairns.  It looked like fun.  Maybe it would be cooler in the mountains.

So, we had a lot scheduled.  We went later to play the Pokies.  This is something Australia also has in common with our home.  Only the common name for a Casino is “Pokie.” Isn’t that more fun.  The Pokies are run by the government and they were a lot more giving than those at home.  It was a fun thing we could do that didn’t take a lot of energy.

More about the Great Barrier Reef tomorrow and Karanda the next day if my shoulder holds out.

Marilynne