My Backyard

Gallery: Bungonia

backyard_adventurer — Mon, 5 May 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Gallery: Jenolan Caves

backyard_adventurer — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:14:00 GMT

Caving

Jenolan Caves

backyard_adventurer — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:49:00 GMT

My new activity for the next couple of months is Caving. The training package is "Certificate of Attainment: Horizontal Caving". It's a certificate III level course. We will be assessed on our ability to guide clients through a cave taking into consideration minimum impact requirements.

Today was our first practical day in the caves: Jenolan Caves to be a little more precise. We were taken through the Plughole adventure cave during the morning, which has been described to us as a good beginer's ability level, plus is has some amazing cave features (speleothems). Then in the afternoon we were given an extensive tour of the tourist cave system with some history of the cave area and its early days as a commercial opperator.

There's a big difference between the adventure cave and the tourist caves. The features might be slightly easier to see and on first glance do look more impressive in the tourist caves, but nothing beats being able to only just make out the black abys of the cave with a head-torch only, or scurrying through tunnels and squeazes with limestone inches from your face.

I have definitely been sold on caving. It ranks higher than a clear, clean abseil.

Myuna Bay Sport & Recreation

backyard_adventurer — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:00:00 GMT

With the ANZAC long weekend there was an Active Family Getaway camp held at Myuna Bay Sport and Recreation Centre. It's a beautiful place to work with large open areas, new accommodation for guests and friendly co-workers, except it doesn't do so well in heavy rain. It's very hard to do outdoor activites (rock-climbing, canoeing, giant swing, bike riding) when the sky comes falling down. Thursday night it was raining so hard I woke up. (Which is very rare; I normally sleep like the dead.) We managed to get an hour of archery in before another down pour on Friday morning. And then come Saturday and Sunday the clouds dispersed and we were blessed with gorgeously warm days, complete with warm breazes. A complete 180 degree change to end the camp on a more comfortable note.

U'13 Girl's Development Camp

backyard_adventurer — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:56:00 GMT

I've just returned from a week at Bathurst where I was in the role of Development Umpire Coach. In short this means that I have been learning how to teach beginning and early development umpires. As a staff member I was given a T-shirt to wear as uniform and a navy towel with the Hockey NSW emblem sewn in. All very pretty. We stayed at The Scots School, just shy of Bathurst city. The school is not too bad, large and spacious. Thankfully it didn't rain on us during the week, although it certainly threatened to do just that most of the time. No photos of this trip. With all the key participants being under-age I don't want to risk getting into trouble from parents.