Title: Rusty Blooms. Quilt created by Cheryl Kerestes of Wyoming, PA.

It was careless of me not to have posted to the blog on Saturday, the last day of the AQS Lancaster, PA Quilt Show, but my author presentation was at 10:00 rather than noon. Then I had to check out of the hotel and head to Hanover before they completely clocked the streets for the big Saint Patrick Day parade. A rather flimsy excuse, I admit.  Perhaps giving a couple of extra photos will help make up for it. In truth, I could have photographed every quilt at the show with each of them demonstrating a different technique or something unique about the design or the sheer skill. As I have become more familiar with quilting and quilters, I think the extraordinary variety is what I appreciate most and that is something that I try to capture in the Helen Crowder Adventure Series of Small Town Lies, Small Town Haven, and future novels. (More about that in a later post).

The way in which quilters come to the craft is also fascinating to me as a writer. Some are of course introduced to it by a mother, grandmother, etc., while others gravitate to it because they sew or have another fabric-related skill. Some are looking for a new interest; one woman that I know was in a situation where she simply needed a quilt and there were none available to buy. Once she made the first one, she was hooked, so to speak. This is another part that I include in the novels; the longtime quilters and the novices who take it up for different reasons.

I think that the two quilts in this post are great examples of skill and variety.

Title: Prairie Serenade. Created by Shelly Burge from Lincoln. NE

The new floors are in and the temporary kitchen will move from the bedroom to the living room, although that’s only the cooking items. The partial pantry and glassware will remain and the furniture can’t be place properly until after we paint. That leads me to the remaining steps.

Cabinets and granite are major components, new appliances – not picked out yet – electrical, painting, cleaning, garage, and front yard exterior work. That is the physical part of the remodel – then there is moving everything back in. Oh yes, still have to order the entertainment center and do the custom insides for the pantry. This means that we are about halfway, although some of those items will go in fairly quick sequence. Others could be delayed depending on different factors. We’re managing probably as well as most people do, but the disruption is tiring. For example, rather than walk from the master into the kitchen to get a glass of ice water, it’s pour water from the Brita pitcher into the glass and go to the garage to get ice from the fridge. Oh wait, it’s been a few hours. Take the Brita pitcher to the garage so I can empty the ice trays and refill them before you put ice in the glass and take the Brita pitcher back to the bathroom to refill it. Nothing insurmountable, just takes more time. People who have been through it all have tales to tell and it will be the same for us. At least we aren’t trying to juggle children and pets as part of the process.

I am a football fan much as I am a NASCAR fan in the sense of my husband is the true fan and I have been drawn into it over the years. If he’s not home, I won’t necessarily turn a game on, but if there isn’t anything else on that I am particularly interested in, I will. Now, for those who have only been watching the New Orleans Saints play when they actually started to be contenders for the Superbowl, there are many years prior to that when the notion they would ever be contenders was essentially absurd. At that point, what fans hoped for was just a winning year or a not as bad a losing year. Playoffs? – no, not realistically. The real slump was back when fans would show up to games with paper sacks over their heads; nose, mouth and eyeholes cut and “The Ain’ts” written on the sack. On the other hand, we’re talking New Orleans, so fundamentally, win or lose, there was a reason to party. Understanding this was part of being a Saints’ fan and when they brought a new head coach in that was supposed to “fire the team up” and who was known for his hard-nosed approach of “winning is everything” attitude, that was obviously not as good a match as anticipated. He didn’t stay for long, although I suspect if he put the experience into perspective, he recognized why it didn’t work out.

Interestingly, about the time the Saints started having fairly reliable winning seasons, Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the city and the Saints temporarily went to Houston. This, too, had an emotional impact on the city and while there was criticism about pushing to get the Superdome repaired with all the other damage that people had suffered, there were imminently practical reasons to do so. The return of the Saints gave a boost economically and emotionally and it was 2009 (right at 4 years later) when the team stunned the city by not only making their first appearance at the Superbowl, but winning as the underdogs. “Who Dat?” became common lexicon and it is unlikely that the term “The Ain’ts” will be used again. However, they did not play well on the road this year and with last night’s defeat, their season is over for now. I don’t know yet who I will be rooting for, so I’ll have to see who’s left in the line-up.

A quick word. The internet fee at this hotel is absurd and therefore, I will post Day 16 early tomorrow, then there will be no more until after the 19th when we return home.

For Day 15, an easy flight to Sydney and I was glad it was a Sunday afternoon because I imagine that traffic in from the airport would have been quite jammed. We once again have a great location from the hotel in the historic area known as “The Rocks” and within steps of Circle Quay. I’ll read more about the Rocks, although it was apparently where many of the convicts worked and later a neighborhood that was considered unsavory was established. That is hardly the case today and we poked around among small restaurants, passed the Museum of Modern Art, and looked up the street at the closing hours of the weekly market that we chose not to explore since it was rather late. The claim of the Fortunes of War to be Sydney’s oldest pub though will draw us there for a meal. According to one of the pamphlets, one other pub makes the same claim, but this one is closer to us. Circle Quay on the Harbor has a variety of cruise boats and ferries, to include one that takes you to the zoo entrance. Aside from the fact that I love zoos, we haven’t see a koala bear yet.

There is also a red double-decker hop on-hop off option that goes to almost 30 stops with commentary and that’s the plan for tomorrow as we determine which, if any, spots we will want to return to after we have completed the tour. We did cut back in eating for lunch and that helped and the regular restaurant in the hotel was closed, so it was the bar again. That’s actually the fourth meal we have eaten in a hotel bar, but when you are staying in high end places, that translates into a high end meal, just with a more limited menu. My husband had calamari and I did prawns in a spicy tomato sauce, so it wasn’t as if we were having beer and nachos. (Not that I don’t thoroughly enjoy a good plate of nachos). The cricket match is scheduled to continue until Tuesday and Australia has pulled ahead with a comfortable lead and my husband has grasped at least the basics of play. Our driver on the wine tour was a big fan and he explained a number of things about it on Friday as we drove back from the tour. He had been listening to the match on the radio and we assured him he could continue to listen to that instead of playing a music selection for our benefit.

Anyway, the topic is Sydney. The clouds began to clear and the weather promises to be nice for the remaining part of our trip. We shall see what the City is all about.

A day of contrasts. We said our goodbyes to the Spirit of Freedom crew and fellow passengers and went to increasing small airports as we flew Cairns, Alice Springs, Ayers Rocks. The coast gave way to open spaces that became redder and less green. It was reminiscent of West Texas except there is eucalyptus and other vegetation rather than mesquite and the hard packed earth covered with a layer of sand is the red soil such as you find in Hawaii. The iconic Uluru (Ayers Rock, Red Rock, Red Centre) and the sister Kuta Tijuta came into view and it is quite a sight.

In the best spirit of capitalism, they have built a small resort town a few miles from “the RocK” and within the national park area. There are three hotels and a campground to accommodate different budgets, although like we have found so far in Australia, food and beverage are expensive. There is a bank, post office, small grocery store, cafes, and the handful of shops you would expect to see. There are a huge number of tours you can then take – driving, walking, sunrise, sunset, stargazing, dinner under the stars, camel tours (yes, really), or self-drive. A series of free events take place each day in the Town Center, all highlighting Aboriginal culture.

The heat is significant and from the time you get on the bus that carries you from the airport, the driver emphasizes hydration. In this type of climate, you have to constantly hydrate because once you begin to feel thirsty, you’re already at a point where you should have appropriate liquids. (Water and non-carbonated/non-alcoholic are best.) We checked the room quickly, then went down to the bar for a beer and snack and looked among the different tour options. We determined that the sunset tour the next afternoon that included a 1.5 hour walk prior to sunset would give us what we were looking for. We booked that and returned to the room to rearrange things that had been swapped from bag to bag in our different configurations. (I will do a separate post about that at the end of the trip because there have been some interesting aspects to that process.)

A leisurely stroll to the town center to get oriented, and catch part of the sunset there and part back at the hotel. The sky didn’t have a full array of colors due to the cloud cover, although there were some lovely bands of red. Sunset is quite late – a little after 7:30, so by the time we did that it was coming up on dinner. Despite other dining options, we were too tired to leave again and decided on burgers with fries and beer in the lounge bar. Of course, it is a resort and they were gourmet burgers so that was $27 per burger. (Just wanted to give an idea of what I mean by expensive). Tomorrow will be a busy, busy day!

Our first dives on the Great Barrier Reef. The trip began with a well-organized pick-up from the hotels and a very scenic flight from Cairns up the coast to Lizard Island where we caught the dive boat as the 3-day people departed. Oh, and yes, a monitor lizard did cross our paths as we walked from the landing area to the beach where we piled into tenders and were zipped to the dive boat where we will live for the next four days. We’ve been on other dive vessels and to be honest, while this one is nice, it doesn’t have some of the amenities that we are accustomed to, although it’s nothing that we can’t adjust to. There were two dives today on a part of the Great Barrier Reef with some of the fish we hadn’t seen since being in Fiji and our first time to see a bearded cuttle fish. I didn’t see it initially when the dive master wrote it on her slate, but I was looking for something smaller. It was about four times the size of what I was expecting and once I focused on it, it was an interesting variation on the cuttlefish that I had previously seen. Clown fish, of course, and husband saw a reef shark that I missed (didn’t bother me to miss it). It is amazing how many types of fish are found in warm waters all over the world – the rainbow parrotfish being a great example. They are throughout the Caribbean, Florida, and the South Pacific. On to those that we don’t get though – triggerfish (infrequent for us), unicorn fish, some additional varieties of angel fish, and then those that we can’t identify. They have a book on board for reference, but there are two factors to consider. First, is that despite all the effort of researchers, you can’t include all the fish in a book. There are simply too many. Also, juveniles of a species often look very different as they pass through one or more distinct phases in becoming an adult and so their appearance can change dramatically. Unfortunately, visibility was reduced today due to some recent winds and there is a better forecast for tomorrow. There was a lovely sunset, however.

There is quite an international mix of passengers – Australian, English, Spanish, German, French, Danish, American, and naturally, a mostly Australian crew. We haven’t met everyone yet, mostly the four day people as we had the transit time together. There is normally (as seems to be the case here), a group dynamic of “we already know each other”, and it will be interesting to see how long it takes to have full interaction. I imagine that will begin tomorrow. Oh, no photos for a bit because of connectivity issues. Sorry, but those will come.

Cairns Harbor at Night. View from our room.

I didn’t exactly miss sunrise. I was up and on our balcony several minutes early. In fact, as it turned out there were well over a dozen people walking about on the piers, and one of the cruise boats headed out for what must have been a sunrise excursion. The geographical factor that I hadn’t taken into account was “the Dividing Range”, that we could see from our balcony. The mountains divide Cairns from the Coral Sea and who knows what else and I’m not sure of their elevation, but they are tall enough so that while you get the pretty sunrise colors, the actual sun coming up from behind them takes longer than I wanted to wait. That also explained why the cruise boat went out of the harbor and around the point behind the mountains. Ah well, there will be spectacular sunrises to come.

Due to a slight miscalculation on my part, we did what in the Army is referred to as “duffle bag drag” today because the agent that I used for most of the trip booked us into the Shangri La for two nights and the dive trip package came with one night stay at the Pacific International, about two blocks up on the Esplanade. We relocated and again, the room was ready for early check-in, so we were able to get situated. Ah, a digression to discuss packing. The dive vessel we go on tomorrow is a one-week trip, with a 3 or 4 day option. We are taking the 4-day segment and what that means is that the one-week and 3-day people have already been diving and will arrive early tomorrow at Lizard Island. We 4-dayers will be flown by a tiny airplane to meet up with the boat and swap places with the 3-dayers. It’s the small airplane that causes us to be restricted to only 45 pounds of luggage total for each of us. If you know anything about dive gear, you know that a full set, plus much more than a swimsuit and a toothbrush puts you close to 45 pounds. The dive operation has a place for us to store our extra luggage and that’s why we decided to change our usual approach and use rental gear from the boat and leave most of our equipment at home. However, what was also unknown to us was that Quantas (we’re using them for the intra-Australia movement) has a 16-pound limit for carry-on pieces. Even though we trimmed down incredibly for this trip, we have to re-configure what we pack where depending on which flight we’re taking. A minor irritant and an interesting operation.

Okay, all of that shuffling about today means we really couldn’t take any of the day trips out of Cairns as we had thought we might. We continued to explore downtown Cairns and walked up to mid-town. There’s a nice mall that fronts the railway station and we took a pass through to see that it, too, was decorated for Christmas, complete with a few store clerks wearing headbands with felt reindeer antlers on them. One of the anchor stores was a Target, and no, we didn’t venture inside that.

In actuality, we wandered back to the Esplanade and had lunch at the Bavarian Beirgarten. We had been startled to see it yesterday and a cold Hofbrau beer and currywurst for husband and schnitzel sandwich for me was a meal that we hadn’t had in a long time. We’ll be eating at Barnacle Bill’s tonight though for a final round of Cairns seafood. Oh, last night was Tha Fish on the pier where husband had a whole baby gold band snapper and I did the barramundi in a lemon beurre blanc. The barramundi seems to be the equivalent to our mahi as the most common fish served. It’s also similar in taste and texture.

Okay, the time is finally arriving for me to be off the net for about five days as we lose connectivity. I will faithfully blog every day on the computer and post in sequence after the fact. We go directly to the Northern Territory to the famous Ayers Rock after coming off the dive boat and I’m not entirely sure what our internet access will be out there. I suppose there is the slight chance that I won’t be able to post until we reach Melbourne late on 11 Dec. For all I know, part of the experience with being deep in the Northern Territory is that they want you to feel closer to Mother Earth by not having internet. In any case, you will have a day-to-day description to get caught up with when I can post.