Preparing to Leave for Western Australia

Our Blue Sky Caravan at Alice Springs

When we sold our house in March, we planned to remain at Alice Springs until July so we could help daughter Meredith finish some beautification projects around her house. 

The additional three months also ensures that the Top End of Australia will have a much more pleasant climate than it would have at other times of the year.

All the good advice we have is that you do Western Australia in an anti-clockwise direction. This ensures that when you travel the long, gruelling distance across the Nullabor Plain, the wind is a tail wind and not a head wind. Head winds cause a greater fuel burn than a tail wind (of course), so it’s a better way to do it. More cost effective.

If we spend six months in Western Australia, it will also mean that as we travel south, summer will be approaching and summer in the south is more gentle than summer in the north. Make sense?

By the time we travel north to Alice Springs from South Australia, we will be acclimatised to the summer heat.

Apart from getting Meredith’s retaining walls, new shed and other tasks done, we are equipping our Toyota Prado with a UHF radio (to be fitted next week) and some larger capacity spot/flood lights. The car will be serviced before we go and probably get fitted with two new batteries – nothing worse than having a battery die 20 km outside some remote township and both batteries are nearing their failure dates.

Then there’s the caravan. We need to give it an off-the-power-grid test to ensure our gas appliances (fridge, water heater and cooker) work and that the solar-powered water pump and lighting work also. We don’t expect any problems here, but prior preparation prevents poor performance.

Finally, we need to trim the loading of the caravan as much as possible to keep weight within legal parameters. 

 

In the near future we’ll develop a loosely designed travel itinerary and post it online.

Robin

PS: We are beginning to get excited about our trip as the time draws closer

Circumnavigating Australia and New Zealand

Christina and I are at Rosebud, Victoria at the bottom of Australia. We're spending a week at the Nepean Country Club but on Friday will be returning to the Bellerine Country Club to spend a few days with friends Michael and Gayle before heading off to Sydney and a cruise around Australia and New Zealand.

The Bellerine Country Club is an up-market over 55s/retirement village adjoined a golf course. There are numerous occupied houses and additional houses are being added weekly.

How did we happen to be here? Well, originally we were travelling to Nuriootpa in South Australia to check out The Vines Retirement Village but daughter Meredith had to attend a medical appointment at Adelaide and grandson Tory was on school holidays and it all just happened.

Meredith and Tory accompanied us to Adelaide and Meredith wanted to visit friends in Melbourne, so we finished up extending our trip. Meredith and Tory flew back to Alice Springs leaving Christina and I to carry on with the rest of our holiday.

A day before driving out from The Alice, we received a very good offer to join the cruise going round Australia and New Zealand and as our friends Michael and Gayle were on the cruise, decided to sign up.

We are looking forward to the cruise, which will be our third with Princess Cruises.

I'll keep you posted about the cruise as internet availability and motivation allow.

Robin

The Problem with Evolution

The main problem with evolution is that people don't understand it. At most, many people know what evolution means ie, the dictionary definition, but they don't study it sufficiently to grasp how it works.

This leads to people making silly claims like, "if we evolved from apes, how come apes are still here?" Anyone who has studied evolutionary biology knows that at one point in evolutionary history, humankind branched from apes becoming a separate species.

My grandson, who is 13, and I have been having some interesting discussions about ethics, religion, evolution and other topics. He's doing ethics and religion at school, but not evolution because it goes against the school's religious teachings. I'm filling in the gaps.

In so doing, I'm taking as much care as I can to not impose my views upon him, but to give him sufficient knowledge to critically analyse what he hears at school, elsewhere and from me and to decide what he believes.

During our discussions about evolution I showed him Richard Dawkins excellent title, "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution." It's a bit advanced for him to read yet, but it has some excellent diagrams about design failures in animals and humans.

For example, both the vas deferens of human males and the vaso vagal nerve of giraffes has been stretched awkwardly in a manner that would not have been done by an intelligent designer. The former was stretched when testes, which were once internal organs, descended from the body. The giraffe's nerve stretched as the length of giraffe's necks increased.

One was done to ensure fertility and the other to ensure food in tall trees could be accessed. Both survival strategies.

Next, we spoke about the large number of human births that don't go as well as they should. With a grandmother who is a midwife, information about the imperfection of the birthing process is easy to get. Maybe if the birthing process had been designed by someone smart enough, it would work much better than it does. He understood my logic.

Finally, I tried to explain to him the concept of irreducible complexity but, I'm not sure he grasped it fully.

We touched on the fact that birds evolved from lizards and that the evolutionary progress can be seen both in the fossil record and in some reptiles that are still present. We've left that for another day.

I love my grandson very much and enjoy our in-depth discussions about such often discussed matters. If I can get him to think rationally about life, the universe and everything associated with it, I will be forever happy. There are too many people who believe things that are irrational and that can't withstand intelligent scrutiny.

If you are still confused by evolutionary biology, I highly recommend Dawkins' text because it is easy to understand and gives a sound coverage of very complex topics.

Robin