Australia

Having this scanner has brought up a lot of memories - I have gone through all the photos I have accumulatd over the years, and found some treasures that I haven't thought about in a while. Ah, nostalgia...

So, before I started college, I took a year off. I went to high school at a small all-girls' school, and I boarded there, so I was pretty aware that I had a poor concept of what the real world was like. So I took a year off. I went to England first for three months, and had a blast. Then I went to Australia. My mom gave me a camera for Christmas that year, which I put to good use for the first few months of my time in Australia while I was working in eucalyptus forests in Northern Victoria. The area and animals were gorgeous, and I had some time on my hands. I was helping a graduate student assess the affects of logging on protected temperate rain forests. It involved a lot of camping, tramping around, collecting data, fixing stuff, and sitting around waiting for I can't remember what (probably lunch time, since we both were voracious eaters). Also Brooke was a bad cook so I did most of the cooking for the two of us. I really wanted to see a snake since Australia has some pretty fierce snakes but Brooke was the only one to see any snakes, actually she saw quite a few and shrieked each time since she hated snakes.

Here is a photo I took from one of our research sites, looking up through the eucalyptus trees to the sky:



Here is my other favourite photo from the trip. Matt and Woody are riding across a field in the Blue Mountains in northern Victoria. You can see more of the mountains in the background, they are called the Blue Mountains because all the eucalyptus trees in the mountains emit vapours that make them look vibrantly blue from a distance. If you have ever seen the movie called The Man from Snowy River, it was filmed in this area (rather than in the Snowy Mountains, which is where the story is actually set - the Snowy Mountains are further north and considered by most to be less beautiful than the Blue Mountains). Anyway, the photo:

My mom came and visited me there for a while. It was fun, although I do remember being a typically bratty sulky ungrateful 18 year old for a little while. Sorry ma!