Mood Indigo

Posted on April 15, 2012 by waggadventure

As we were hanging out in Beechworth and its surroundings over Easter, we started to think about that area of northern Victoria as becoming our new Jasper. Jasper was our retreat area, a fairly quick trip from Edmonton into the mountains where we could relax and have fun. Now, after two trips to the region, covering the local government areas of  Indigo Shire (Beechworth, Rutherglen, etc.), “The Rural City of Wangaratta” (including Oxley, Milawa, Whitfield and the King Valley wine region), and Alpine Shire, we’re sure that this will be a common getaway location (though we haven’t actually been to Alpine Shire yet; it borders on the other two shires, and people tell us we need to go to Bright, Gapsted, and Myrtleford, so we’ll get there sometime soon).

One of the main draws of this area is that it is culinary heaven. Milawa actually calls itself a ‘gourmet region’. It has a great cheese factory, an olive (and everything related) shop, and a winery with an amazing restaurant. Oxley has a great winery with another good restaurant. We wrote about these places back in January.

An unassuming place that looks about the same on the inside as it does outside, the Green Shed could hold its own in a major city.

Beechworth, however, seemed to go one step beyond. There were three absolutely amazing restaurants in a city of about 3500 people. Provenance, where we were staying, is one of the top ones in the country; we ate there twice. The Green Shed was a cool, old green brick and tin building, heated by a fireplace, that also had incredible food. Our waiter was a cool farm boy with a passion for dirt bikes and a burning desire to visit Canada (he asked us lots of questions). The third was Gigi’s – maybe not up to the level of the other two, but still pretty spectacular. Gigi’s is sort of Italian/Australian, whereas the others are a wacky fusion of Australian with Asian and Mediterranean influences (Green Shed has both dolmades and curry on the menu!). And 10 km down the road, there was also the Stanley Pub, which isn’t as much a pub as another fine dining establishment.

You don't expect desserts like the ones at Provenance in a small town. This was...well, the dark thing was a licorice semifreddo. No idea what the rest of it was, but it was tasty!

Slightly more down scale was the Beechworth Bakery, which sells very good bread and pies (meat…and probably fruit but we didn’t notice). And those are just the places we tried. There were several others that looked worth checking out, but we only had a few days.

In terms of food retail, there is a huge organic shop that blows away anything in Wagga. Lots of fresh produce, and some really great finds such as dried chanterelles (imported from France, but we bought a few packages because they were a really good deal). And a good cheese shop – Larder – that also sells house-made preserves.

And of course, there are wineries and even a brewery (where Dan bought a really cool cycling jersey). There are something like 19 wineries in the Beechworth area, and they make some pretty ‘premium’ wine. Many of these produce very small batches that retail in the 3-digit per bottle range. The only real problem with wineries this small is that they don’t actually have cellar doors – it isn’t worth their time to give away samples of wines that most people aren’t going to splurge on anyway, and when you only make about 300 bottles of something that is already very sought after, why bother? When you get 99 point ratings in the national newspapers, you don’t have to give out samples…

There are a few wineries with cellar doors though. We only went to one: Pennyweight. These people are pretty good at marketing themselves in the town. Not only can you get their wines at the good restaurants (we had a Gamay at one restaurant and then one of their dessert wines another evening, with dinner) but there are two ways to get to the winery. You can drive there on the road, or cycle there on the Murray to Mountains Trail, which we did. And most other visitors there at the same time had done the same thing…most of the people sampling were holding helmets. One ‘driver’ actually noted that all the healthy people there made her feel guilty! Of course, marketing wine to cyclists isn’t really easy; how do you get them to buy a case if they can’t carry it home? Well, you offer free shipping, which we would have taken advantage of but instead just said we would come pick up our purchases the next day on our way home.

An idyllic setting at Pennyweight, on a cycle trail, where you can buy a bottle of wine and a cheese plate for the patio...then not have to drive home. You just have to figure out how to not fall off your bike.

We quite like Pennyweight. They make good wines, and they have bio-dynamic certification.  Before visiting, we weren’t sure what this meant – was it sort of a notch below organic? But no, it is actually a more stringent certification. They have to be organic, but also have as little impact on the local environment as possible. Not sure exactly what they do (probably minimal irrigation, etc.) but whatever it is, the results are great. The family who runs it come from generations of wine makers (Rutherglen pioneers) and this one son wanted to break out and do something different.

The bike trail that Pennyweight backs onto is another attraction to the region. It is a huge cycling holiday area, with at least 15% of the vehicles you see on the road having bikes on a rack. There is something really special about being able to ride to a nice restaurant for lunch and stop at a winery on the way back.

We did get to meet some other winemakers from Beechworth at the festival markets, some good, some not so good… Both Amulet and Indigo have cellar doors but came to the markets – we didn’t make it to their properties – with some good to very good product. Others, who shall remain nameless, came with…well, if you can’t say anything good about them, don’t say anything at all.

Herbs from this courtyard garden flavour much of the food at Provenance, including scrambled eggs that were among the best we've had!

There is also a really good wine shop in town, selling wines from Beechworth, Rutherglen and King Valley wineries that don’t have their own retail operations. This is where we found some really great stuff! The guy also stocks some European wines and a handful of ones from better wineries with cellar doors (Pizzini in King Valley, Stanton and Killeen in Rutherglen, for example) but mostly it is really rare and fantastic local vino that most people will never taste.

So yeah, northern Victoria is a gold mine for foodies. What more could you want besides gourmet restaurants and primo wines? How about apples, chestnuts, berries, etc!? Fruit is so much better when you buy it from the farmer who picked it that morning. And here’s a weird fact: strawberries there have two seasons – spring and autumn. So we got some fresh autumn strawberries along with apples…never heard of such a bizarre fruit cycle in Canada! And a brewery with an interesting selection of pale ales…that will warrant its own post after our next visit.

Three of the honeys tempted us enough to buy them: Red Box (a gum tree), Tasmanian Manuka (Aussies pronouce it Monica, not Maa-new-ka), and a generic local honey infused with vanilla bean!

And a honey factory and store that sells a huge range of interesting honeys; in Canada, we would have clover, and dandelion, etc., honeys, but here we sampled various kinds of box and gum and other native tree and flower honeys…some not to our liking, some we brought home (WK, you will like this place!)

Sure, the hills there will never replace the majestic mountains of the Jasper and Banff national parks, but we’re pretty happy to have found a high elevation getaway.

Posted in apples, Beechworth, cheese, cycling, fruit, mountains, pie, small town culture, wine, wineries | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

my little golden horseshoe

Posted on April 12, 2012 by waggadventure

When we booked our accommodation and restaurants in Beechworth for the Easter long weekend, we did it early because we reckoned that being a long weekend, and the last one before winter sets in, it might be busy. Little did we know how busy! Maybe if we had done a bit of homework, we would have…

Northern Victoria takes pride of ownership of one of Australia's most famous criminals. Ned Kelly is everywhere!

Every year on the Easter weekend, the town of Beechworth grows from about 3500 people to…well, this year they estimated somewhere between 15000 and 20000. Over the weekend, they host the Golden Horseshoes Festival, celebrating the day that some guy shod a horse with golden horse shoes way back when…blah, blah, blah…we didn’t actually pay that much attention to what was going on.  Whatever it was that happened, the real importance of it is that it is actually a celebration that doesn’t involve Ned Kelly. That part of north eastern Victoria is very tied to the life of Australia’s favorite bush ranger (their term for criminal!) and everywhere you go you see references to him. The Beechworth Bakery even has a Ned Kelly pie and Ned Kelly Damper (spinach and carrot bread…quite tasty!). But this weekend he was sort of in the shadows.

So, what happens at the festival in this small ‘mountain’ town? A market. Another market down the street.  Some street performers and buskers. A music stage. Some sausage sizzles. Another market. A parade. A motorcycle muster…just your typical small town Aussie weekend really, but with a lot more people and a lot of energy. And another market.

It's not a market unless someone is giving away samples of wine! We bought some really good shiraz from these interlopers from Central Victoria.

The first market was your typical Australian morning market: gold coin entry (that’s $1 or $2 coin) to wander around a flea market environment with everything from grannies selling home-made jam to people selling Chinese-made crappy toys. What sets them apart from Canadian flea markets is that there is usually a winery or two offering samples…what more could you want at 9 am on a Saturday morning? This is where we bought our chestnuts (which are a bit of a pain in the ass to prepare, but make a damn fine risotto!).  Second market was the ‘food market’ – much smaller, a lot more wineries! We bought some really good wine, which we were later told was a bit controversial because the people were from Heathcote, which is about 225 km away, and they were seen as interlopers in the Beechworth wine region! Oh well, it wasn’t like the best of the Beechworth wineries were there, and these interlopers were the best of the bunch at the markets.

They said that this wasn't a real golden horseshoe - the originals were on display in the jewelery store on the corner - but we think maybe they were.

At noon was the highlight of the festival: the reenactment of the shoeing of the horse. Completely hokey! But entertaining and enlightening for someone who has never seen a farrier in action. The horse was a bit anxious about performing in front of the crowd, but took it all quite well really. For his troubles, he got to lead the parade. Unfortunately, we missed the start of the parade because we were having ice cream and listening to a bluegrass band.

The parade. Wow! Another highlight of the festival. It was, again, a bit hokey, but you could really see how much effort and enthusiasm the people put into this event. The floats and other ‘entertainment’ in the parade were creative and fun, and the audience was having a ball. It went for about 3 blocks…that covered pretty much the whole town.

It doesn't get much better than a Sound of Music-inspired float with drunken yodelers.

It was far superior to any small-town parade we have seen in Canada, and probably better than most big city ones even, and we will attribute that to the lax (or lack of) alcohol consumption laws in Australia. Parade participants are much more interesting when they are drinking!

After the parade, things calmed down a bit. The crowd at the main stage drifted away, the market vendors packed their wares, and the street performers headed to the pub for a pint or two or twelve.  As the sun set, the streets were noticeably quieter. The main stage area, on Camp Street (one of the main streets) looked like last call at a wedding reception: tables full of empty bottles and parents stagger-dancing with their tired children. It was actually a bit sad for the Canadian ex-pat musician who got stuck with the closing time slot. And then there was a night market – the first time they had done this. Pretty much an assortment of vendors from the earlier markets, with a couple of new ones (including a new winery…yay!).

These enterprising kids set up a rogue table away from the official markets to sell tarts. And at $2 a piece, these tarts were one of the best deals ever. Their table was at the gate to our b'n'b, and the kid in the middle is the owners' daughter. The tarts were made by one of the best chefs in rural Australia!

Sunday was a lot more low-key. Probably 2/3 of the crowd was gone…though we didn’t go to the outdoor church service, which might have been very busy. We went birding instead, though it might have been interesting to attend a service on a large (very large) rock in a park, beside a historic jail, with cannons on it. Strange. There was also a motorcycle muster and show, a family bike ride (we avoided that, though later in the day, while cycling to a winery, Lisa did almost run over some little raggamuffin who couldn’t quite figure out how to share the trail), and mountain bike races. And maybe the saddest part of the weekend was that there were still music stages set up…we felt really sorry for the guy playing solo at the end of one street, with an audience of two. And one of them was the sound man. And then it got even sadder when we walked by again and realized that the other person in the audience was the next performer, and when she went on he didn’t even stick around to hear her. Bad planning on someone’s part. By mid-afternoon Sunday, Beechworth was back to its sleepy self; the streets were open to traffic, the ATMs were working again, you could get into a coffee shop. All that was left was a special Easter Monday farmer’s market (where we got some good produce for the week, including some dirt cheap apples).

So it was an odd event. Totally unexpected, but something that we think we will go to again. It wasn’t that the festival itself was anything spectacular, but it made a fun vibe in the town at a great time of year to visit that part of the country.

And a reminder: enter our contest!

Posted in apples, Beechworth, cycling, farmers market, festivals, holidays, horses, market, mountains, small town culture, wine, wineries | 1 Comment

chestnuts roasting on an open fire

Posted on April 9, 2012 by waggadventure

Easter weekend was a bit confusing, as we went on an autumn getaway on what we normally think of as a spring weekend. And to make it more confusing, we experienced temperatures ranging from about 3 to 29 c., in an area where both apples and strawberries are currently in season. WTF?

Walking through this courtyard at Provenance one night after dinner, we came across a brush-tailed possum. Rural Australia is really cool!

On our New Year vacation, we met people who told us we needed to go to Beechworth, a well-preserved, historic gold-mining town in north eastern Victoria. It is sort of on the north edge of where we spent NYE, in the heart of one of the Victorian wine and food regions. Taking their recommendations, we booked in at a B’n’B type place called Provenance, which boasts #31 on the Gourmet Traveler magazine top 100 restaurants in Australia.

The apples we know what to do with. The chestnuts...well, first you have to prepare them, then figure out how to serve them. Our first experiment might be risotto.

Provenance, Beechworth, and Indigo Shire (Australians, like Hobbits, use the term shire for regional government areas) were all we hoped for, and maybe more.  A town of about 3500 people at an elevation of about 56o metres, Beechworth’s prime industry is officially tourism; given that most of this tourism is based around wine and food, their prime industry is really culinary delights! While Provenance was probably the best place we ate all weekend, all our meals in the region were amazing and we had a lot of incredible wines from small (and fortunately sort of obscure…) producers in the area. And we came home with apples, strawberries, beans, lettuce, carrots, chestnuts (fresh chestnuts!!! of course we don’t know what to do with them, but we will figure it out), all in season at the same time. As well as some great bread, honey from Beechworth Honey (more kinds of honey than you can count…), and a lot of cheese from a side trip to Milawa. And, of course, a boot full of really great local wines to keep us stocked up until our next venture into a wine region.

There is so much to say about this weekend that it will probably take a few posts. This one will cover a few ‘highlights’. The big thing was that when we booked the trip in January, we did it based on the fact that we were going to have a four-day weekend for Easter. We didn’t know that it was the biggest weekend of the year in Beechworth, when about 15000 people descend on it (actually ascend to it) for the Golden Horseshoes Festival. So we were lucky that we not only had our accommodation booked but that the OCD one of us (Lisa edit: You’re welcome!) had actually booked all of our meals.

With the restaurants all full on Saturday afternoon, people on the streets resorted to eating whatever they could find. Or whoever.

There was a bit of a glitch because after learning about the festival, we did a last minute change on what day we would go to Milawa, leaving us with no lunch plans for Saturday in Beechworth. And when we did try to eat, the only place we could get into said it would be an hour for food. We ended up getting samosas and onion bhaji from a trailer at the festival… The town was so overloaded with people that both the ATMs broke down, and all the credit card/EFTPOS machines in town were out of order! The NBN can’t come soon enough to regional Australia…

Another cool thing about Beechworth is that it is part of the Murray to Mountains cycling trail that we wrote about at New Year’s. The original trail runs from Wangaratta to Bright, with an extension from Wang to Milawa. But there is a ‘spur line’ about 1/2 way down the Wang-Bright line, going from a town called Everton to Beechworth. So we did a bit of cycling.

Going down into the gorge was easy. Coming back up? Let's just say that Dan and some guy we met on the trail had a nice chat at the top while Lisa and the other guy's partner came up the hill.

First, on Friday, we did a short tour of the Beechworth gorge (coasting down for 2.5 km, struggling back up the other side…), then drove to Milawa and rode to Wangaratta and back, stopping at a winery for lunch. Dan is extremely proud that Lisa rode 45 km that day! On Saturday morning, while Lisa slept (NO WAY WAS I GETTING BACK ON MY BIKE!), Dan did a 45 km round trip from Beechworth to Tarawingee and back. The first half was a bit of a ‘white knuckle’ ride, partly because it was only about 7 degrees out and he forgot his gloves, but also because it was a 500 m drop over the first 13 km. Which, of course, means a 5oo m climb on the way back… Down took 45 minutes, back up 65! But he thinks it was worth it to be out on the trail while mobs of kangaroos were hanging out having breakfast.  Sunday, the two of us rode the ‘pushies’ (Australians call bicycles push bikes, and some shorten it to pushie) even farther up the hill – a 9 km ride with 250 m climb to a little village called Stanley. A bit of a slog, but worth it because we were going to a great pub for lunch. And then we just had to roll back down the hill to a winery…

An amazing sight, the yellow-tailed black cockatoo in the wild! Sorry this isn't our photo. We do have some, but they are horrible.

The trip up to Stanley also had a real highlight of the trip: we saw yellow-tailed black cockatoos! These birds aren’t ‘rare’, but they aren’t common. And they don’t live around Wagga.  They are quite spectacular. We went hunting for them again on Monday with the car, and managed to find them again, and think it was possible it was the same group of four. They were pretty elusive.

And these cockies weren’t the only good bird sighting we had. Just as we checked in to Provenance, there was a stunning red and green male Australian king parrot in a tree in the courtyard. And on a Sunday morning walk in town, we also saw a female. And we got up close and personal (to the point we think they might have been swooping at us to get us away from the young ones) with a bunch of crimson rosellas. And more close encounters with kookaburras. And on the way home, close to Wagga, we saw a lot of birds of prey: some nankeen kestrels, a black kite and one of the biggest, coolest birds in Australia – the wedge-tailed eagle. These things have a wingspan up to 3 metres, and while their preferred diet is rabbit they have been know to take out joeys (baby roos) and lambs!  Yikes!

To make up for stealing someone's photo of the black cockatoo, we will let anyone who wants it have this photo of a male king parrot. Dan took it and is releasing all copyright...

Coming up in the next post, more details about the festival, some of the great restaurants and wineries we visited, etc…

Posted in agriculture, apples, Beechworth, birds, festivals, parrots, rosellas, wine | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine

Posted on April 5, 2012 by waggadventure

It’s Easter weekend, and being public service employees we get 4 (and 1/2 – as the Uni gives us a bonus leave!) days off. So we’re heading out for a few days of autumnal rest and relaxation. Which is a bit odd, because usually we think of Easter as being a spring thing, when we can expect the snow to be melting, and maybe some early flowers coming up (April showers bring May flowers… except in Oz, where things bloom at weird times and people think that Easter is the onset of winter).

Not being Christians, we don’t actually know of any better Easter songs for the title of this post than the one we chose. And that leads us to the point of this post.

Knowing what this is can be very valuable to you. Read on...

This weekend, we are celebrating the one year anniversary of this blog! And many of you have probably noticed that the titles are sometimes brilliant, sometimes stupid, sometimes cryptic. They at least make sense to Dan…but he is a bit weird. Many of them come from this idiot’s taste in music. So to mark this anniversary, we are having a contest. Unfortunately, to win, you have to get inside the head of a moron…we want you to explain where some of the titles come from [Lisa edit: Good luck! I’ve lived with the man for years and still can’t figure out how – if? – his brain works].

Here’s the basics: of the 93 posts so far, the titles of 38 of them (including this one) are music related. Sometimes it is as easy as a title, sometimes a pun on a title, or sometimes a lyric. To make it a bit easier for you, 24 are titles/puns, and 15 are lyrics.  Your mission, should  you accept it, is to tell us: 1) which 39 posts we are thinking of; 2) what the song was (for 24 of them, that is quite obvious); and 3) the name of the artist.

If you pick Marie Osmond as the performer for one of the songs, you won't get a point. She may (or may not) have done a version of one, but it isn't the one you are thinking of.

Scoring: For the easy ones that are just a title/variation of a title, each correctly answered question gets  you one point. There are a couple of tricky ones, but really not too hard. For ones that involve lyrics, there is bonus point for each one. We’ll give you an example (using a real answer, but one we gave away in the post): if you say that the post Capital Radio was named after the Clash’s song Capital Radio, you get 1 point (you must identify both title and artist).  Easy. Everyone can have one point without thinking! It’s our Easter gift to you. The lyric ones are a bit tougher. For example, for the current post that you are reading, if you properly identify the song the lyrics are from and the artist, you will get two points.

In total, there is a possible total of 54 points.

Some rules though. As we said, you have to be inside the moron’s head to win…so if you correctly identify a song but have the wrong artist, you don’t get any points. No part points – it is all or nothing.  And if you come up with something we don’t know, no bonus points, sorry. Happily, Lisa (the sane one of the duo – unless you count the cats, who are also less moronic than Dan) will tabulate scores and decide on the winning submission. Being a professor, she’s got a keen sense of fairness in marking assignments like this one; but, she’s also a hardass, so you need to be sure that you have all of your i’s dotted and your t’s crossed.

There are a couple of very tricky questions in this contest. This is the answer to one of them. Or another one...

The winner will be the person who gets the most points. Simple! In the case of a tie, whoever was first to submit their list, wins. To enter, put your answers into a Word doc (or Excel spreadsheet or something similar) and email it as an attachment to waggadventure@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is Monday 23 April 8am Australia EST (that’s Sunday 22 April 4pm MT, 6pm ET in Canada). Pay attention to these instructions; again, Lisa’s a hardass marker!

Now, the best part: why would you do this?  Because there is a great prize!  Or more accurately, a choice of prizes. There is only one winner, but you get to choose your prize.

Here’s what we are offering:

Dan remembers a lot of really useless crap, including this horrible band from the 1970s that he used to hear on CFOS. However, though he heard them in Ontario, they were Australian.

Option One: For an international winner who we know, personally, we will 1)  pay for 3 nights accommodation for you and one traveling companion in any city in Australia if  you come to visit us.  We will, of course, be there too!  And we will also take you and your companion to dinner at one of Wagga’s best restaurants when you are here. There is no expiration date on this, so you can win now and collect any time. And it is also transferable…so, for instance, someone can pass it along to a child, friend or parent (as long as we know them, and like them… we don’t want to spend time with any dweebs).

Option Two: For an Australian winner, someone we don’t know, or someone who won’t be coming to Australia, we will put together a huge prize package of every bit of Wagga and other local town memorabilia we can find and mail it to you. So you will get things like a Wagga wine cooler bag, an apron from the Junee Licorice and Chocolate Factory, whatever we can round up. Depending on where you are, we will either mail it from here or post/hand deliver when we are next in Canada. If you are an Australian we know, we will also throw in dinner anywhere in Wagga if you happen to be in town.

Speaking of the 70s, knowing what this is might be useful.

(For accuracy, if you win as an ‘international’ but when you come to collect you don’t plan on leaving for a long time, we will still consider you international and you get to choose Option One. Not many people fall into this category…you know who you are).

And then there is the bonus question!  If the winner is an international person who chooses option one, and can guess within 10 points (high or low) the number of hits we have had on the blog in the first year, they also get dinner at a great restaurant in whatever city they choose to claim the accommodation prize. If this is somewhere like Sydney or Melbourne, that means probably something owned by Neil Perry… This is an amazing bonus deal! Trust us…we’re foodies. And there might be some sort of concessional prize for an Australian who answers this correctly…we’ll negotiate something.

There's a theme song for where this image is from, but that wouldn't be a correct answer. Lisa will give bonus points for someone who explains this photo though.

So have fun trying to answer this quiz. As for how we are celebrating Easter (while you slave over this to win a fabulous prize), we are off to what we have been told is one of the nicest places to visit in the region. We will report back in the next couple of posts. But for now, all we will say is that though there will be some healthy active parts (we’re taking our bikes) it will 4 days of decadence, a lot of wineries, and even a brewery or two. My sins are my own, and they belong to me.

Posted in contest, little river band, music, trivia, visitors, wagga, wagga wagga | 1 Comment

take a chance with a couple of kooks

Posted on April 2, 2012 by waggadventure

This is where koalas live. That dot in the middle of NSW is Narrandera.

Here’s a really interesting factoid: there are 680 species of eucalyptus trees and one species of koala. There may or may not be three subspecies of koala with the Victorian ones being the largest and furriest, NSW mid-size, and those in Queensland smallest and least furry. But what is cool is that depending on where they live, they eat different leaves. So in QLD, they eat grey gum and tallowood; southern dwellers eat blue, swamp, and manna gum; NSW koalas like red river gum leaves from swampy areas. And about 100 km north of Wagga, in a town called Narrandera, is a swampy feast of red river gums that is being used to rehabilitate the state’s koala population.

It was a big weekend in Wagga – there was a Home Show and the Food and Wine Expo, both of which we packed into Saturday and enjoyed. And we even managed to weave in a couple more open houses. Any of which we could write about (the F & W event will get written about next year), but instead we are today going to focus on Sunday, Gloria’s last day here, when we decided to take her try to find some koalas.

On the way, we made a point of remedying the fact that, as she wrote about in her blog, she had yet to see a kookaburra. We had seen some on Saturday morning while cycling, but when we took her to the spot later they were gone. So on our way out of town on Sunday morning (after a quick return home to slap some ointment on the bee sting Dan suffered while fueling the car!) we went to the same neighbourhood and came across a couple of them, getting really good views of one on a wire and another on a sign.

The Sturt Highway between Wagga and Narrandera had been closed during the recent flood period and still had water overflowing into the lanes in some places. This, however, allowed us to do some quality birding on the trip – there were water birds in places they shouldn’t have been! So we saw a lot of ducks, coots, grebes, swamphens, and even some black swans swimming along the roadside.

We didn't get a photo of the ringneck, but did get some great views of a few yellow rosellas.

When we got to Narrandera, the helpful lady at the tourist info booth told us that the koala reserve was off-limits due to it still being a mucky mess after the floods. She said that if we were interested in birds though, we should go to the wetlands… not a lot of logic there: too wet to go where we wanted to be, so go to the wetter place!   So we did, and had some good luck with a variety of birds including a new parrot to us, the Mallee Ringneck.

Then, despite being warned off, we headed toward the koala reserve. A bit of history: a few decades ago, they tried to re-introduce koalas to the region and brought in three. Now, there are about 200 living in the reserve and they don’t know how many have spilled out into the neighbouring woods. All around that side of town there are roadsigns warning of koalas on the roads. And we found that yes, to get to the koala area we would have had to walk a kilometer of stinky mucky trail. So instead, we stayed around the entrance to the area and were amazed at how great the bird life was there.

You are all probably getting sick of us bragging about living amongst parrots, but we don't care. Eastern rosellas like this are pretty much a daily sighting!

Standing in one spot, we were able to see at least three different parrots, various honeyeaters, two kinds of friarbirds, cockatoos of course, and a few other things. And the best view we have ever had of a kookaburra. This guy just sat on a branch in front of us, even while a willie wagtail harassed him. Dan took way too many photos!

In the end, we didn’t find the koalas, but Gloria upped her bird list by at least 10 and we saw a lot of species we hadn’t seen before. And we at least found out where the koala reserve is, because we plan on returning at the end of the month to take part in the annual koala count. How cool will that be?!

We often see kookaburras at a distance, while driving or cycling, so were thrilled that this one sat on a branch about 10 feet above our heads, for a long time. What a spectacular creature!

Posted in birds, honeyeaters, koalas, kookaburras, parrots, Riverina, rosellas, rural life, trees | Leave a comment

and no one touches me

Posted on March 28, 2012 by waggadventure

Anyone who has ever flown into Sydney on an international flight has experienced what is probably one of the oddest experiences a first-time visitor can imagine: being sprayed by the Australian quarantine service. Yes, they spray you down; you and your carry-on luggage, while you sit quietly in your seat (don’t believe us? watch the video). They assure you that it is harmless, and it probably is. But still, being morteined (that must be what they use) before you get off the plane is pretty un-nerving the first time. After a couple of times…ah, whatever, it can’t be any worse than your seatmate’s cologne that you’ve been breathing since Vancouver!

This Australian 'quarantine detector dog' looks sad because they don't feed him. He relies on tourists trying to smuggle in cookies for his meals.

This gassing is just one example of how the Australian government, and particularly AQIS – the people who were so wonderfully nice to let our cats in! – are very strict about what comes into Australia. There are also sniffer beagles at the airport, x-ray machines, and a lot of signs about not bringing in any food or other things that might contaminate the island.

This is, of course, a good thing – Australia has suffered a lot from the introduction of foreign species into the country, and though the average traveler probably doesn’t have a fox, a camel, or even a cane toad in their luggage they could have some organic material that might contaminate something here. Of course, Australia isn’t the only country that does this; Chile does, as we found out on our South American cruise in late 2010. There, you could bring nothing! Here, you can at least declare what you have and let AQIS look at it. But Chile is more strict, which might seem odd because they aren’t an island. But they are a long coastal nation, bordered on one side by an ocean and on the other by a mountain range so pests are kept at bay. Which is why Chilean grape growers are among the few in the world that have never had to deal with phylloxera.

Anyway, this experience of coming into Australia makes one realize that it is an island, a self-contained continent far away from much of the rest of the industrialized world. And so the combination of quarantine, protectionism (yes, the apple growers can complain all they want about New Zealand apples being brought on shore, but it is probably more of an economic fear than a true agricultural threat), and distance mean that most of the food we get here is Australian. Which is a good thing…and an annoying thing.

Good, in that we have always liked to support the farmers where we live. We buy ‘in season’, not giving in and buying (inferior) asparagus from another hemisphere. Easier to do here than in Edmonton, where food-growing season was about 100 days long! Admittedly, we have a hard time buying truly ‘local’ here in Wagga, because it is an area better suited to things like grain, canola, rice (a bit north of here is Australia’s rice bowl) and livestock.

Some things we can get very local and inexpensive. This pile of oranges, lemons and grapefruit cost about $1.50 last year...we are watching this year's crop growing right now, and salivating.

But whenever possible, we buy as local as possible, such as shopping at Duffy Brothers Fruit and Vegetables, where we can, for instance buy berries and stonefruit from Young and Tumbalong as opposed to going to Coles or Woolies and buying fruit from an unknown source. We can also pick our own fruit in these towns, when in season! They might cost a bit more, but we don’t mind.

And as much as possible, we buy Australian. Right now, there is a lot of shit going down about Coles and Woolies and their price wars. Much of it is with with ‘homebrands’, the generic products that they sell. They are either cutting prices big time on Australian grown produce, or sourcing from off shore, and while both have the end result of a lower consumer price, they also hurt the Australian farmers. Even though the supermarkets say that they are treating these items as ‘loss leaders’ (don’t think they use that term here, but Canadians will understand), eventually it has to trickle down to the farmer. And it also affects farmers in that they often sell to smaller vendors (who also get hurt).  Recently, there was a news story about how orchards in Young left almost 30 percent of their plums to rot on the trees this year because they normally sell them through independent markets in Sydney, which can’t compete with the big supermarkets.

OK, these little juicy morsels aren't local. This shot was taken at Stonehenge last June. We can tell that it isn't near Wagga, because if it was a picture from here there would be a lot more lambs.

So, we like to do our share in supporting Australian farmers – and it also means we get veggies fresher than we could often get in Edmonton! And it is kind of cool driving around the Riverina and seeing all the lambs in the paddocks knowing that we could be eating one of them soon (apologies to our ethically-vegetarian friends out there, but we LOVE lamb).

But, having said that, there are times when having limited access to non-Australian products can be annoying. No, we don’t want to start buying produce from China just because it is cheaper, but some things just seem better when coming from other continents. And sometimes we just want ‘the real thing’.

Even though this is made in Griffith, where the majority of the population are of Italian heritage, it isn't Italian-style wine. And it wasn't very good either. But the labels are cool!

For example, we can buy French-style cheeses, such as brie, that are made in Australia. But there is something a bit…well, they aren’t French! Not sure how to explain it properly, but it isn’t just how it is made that makes a French cheese French – it is also the kind of cow, what they eat, where the cheese ages, etc.  Same with British cheeses. There is something in stores here called Red Leicester, but it isn’t real Red Leicester – that only comes from a small part of England, and no one seems to be able to replicate it. We can’t figure out how they can even use the name here! Knight’s Meats does sell some French, Italian and English cheeses, and we do buy them frequently, but sometimes the extra cost isn’t justifiable over the Australian imitation.  And we can buy ‘Italian style’ wine, made by people of Italian heritage in the King Valley, where the climate is similar to that of Italy. But it isn’t Italian wine. As for real Italian wines, there are one or two available in Wagga, along with  a couple of French ones. In the bigger cities, there will be a better variety. We probably won’t be able to get Canadian ones anywhere though.

One thing we will never buy here though is maple syrup…they don’t make it here. But we could buy Canadian maple syrup; it is just a bit expensive here on the island.

Posted in agriculture, apples, Australia, Canada, citrus, fruit, lamb, Riverina, sheep, shopping, wagga | Leave a comment

Guest blog: Australia – it’s for the birds!

Posted on March 25, 2012 by waggadventure

[Remember all of our previous posts about birds? Well, we now have a resident expert here in Wagga, as our friend Gloria has been visiting us for the past couple of weeks. She has written this guest blog to entice any birders out there (what the Aussies call “twitchers”) to visit us! And her life list? A total of 500+ so far…]

One of the joys of visiting Australia (other than seeing Lisa and Dan) is the bird life. There are unique and interesting birds just about everywhere you look. It’s a very odd thing, at least to me as a Canadian, to witness a group of large white Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos hanging out in a big tree or to see a chattering flock of Crimson Rosellas zooming by. In North America, we are only used to seeing these kinds of birds in cages so to see them in their natural environment is amazing.

Here are some sulphur-crested cockatoos feasting on nuts in a tree.

The bird that many people associate with Australia is the Kookaburra. I haven’t actually seen one on this trip (although I did see them when I lived in Papua New Guinea) but I’ve certainly heard them “laughing”. Just as the song says, “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, Merry merry king of the woods is he”. It’s absolutely true – they do tend to sit high up in the gum trees and they do have a very laughing call. However, because they are so high up much of the time, it’s hard to see them.

So far, I’ve seen about 40 new species of birds, and that is just being out and about in Wagga and Canberra, without trying too hard. Among the ones I’ve seen are Superb and Variegated Fairy Wrens, which, true to their name, behave just like House Wrens back home, darting about and singing noisily with their tails stuck up into the air. You can’t miss the Australian Magpies, which are large black and white birds present just about everywhere, and they have a surprisingly melodious and pleasant song, unlike magpies at home. Also very common are the Galahs, which are really pink and grey cockatoos, about the size of a crow. They hang out in flocks and like to graze on people’s lawns, so you often see them in the suburban neighbourhood where Lisa and Dan live. Many Australians think they are a rather stupid bird but a friend of Lisa’s who had us over for dinner has one as a pet and she insists they are very intelligent, despite what the average person may think.

Australia's version of the lawn ornament - only these ones (Galahs) are alive!

It’s a bit of a challenge for Australians to appreciate some of the birds they have here because they are often regarded as pests. For instance, Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos can be very destructive, particularly in orchard areas. They arrive in large flocks and can decimate a fruit crop if the farmer doesn’t keep them away. They have extremely strong beaks and can chew through just about anything, including the wood on people’s homes. If a flock of them starts to chew on your house, you need to take immediate action or you may find the outside of your house is just a shell of its former self. Because they are so large and tend to travel in flocks, Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos aren’t afraid of much so scaring them off by shooting at them usually doesn’t work.

Lisa and I went for a walk around a small lake in Wagga and saw Dusky Moorhens, which look very much like North American Coots, and Swamphens, which are spectacular large wading birds with lustrous purple feathers and a bright red wattle on their faces. We encountered some Australian Shelducks (which look like North American Black Ducks), Australian Wood Ducks (which are basically brown and grey so not nearly as colorful as our Wood Ducks at home) and Cinnamon Teals. We also saw Plumed Honeyeaters, which is a class of birds that we don’t have at home. There are all kinds of honeyeaters, and they love to feast on the nectar of indigenous Australians flowering shrubs/trees like the Banksia and the Bottlebrush, which are both pretty spectacular plants with large brush-shaped flowers. In the Canberra Botanical Gardens, Lisa and I saw another honeyeater – the New Holland Honeyeater, which has flash of bright yellow on its wings. In those gardens, we also saw an Eastern Spinebill, which is like a honeyeater but much smaller. It has a very long curved beak for inserting into the flowers so the closest bird we would have at home is a Hummingbird. The Spinebill, however, does not have the hovering capability of the Hummingbird so it isn’t similar in that sense.

Lisa and I saw this New Holland Honeyeater at the Botanical Gardens in Canberra. Very exciting!

What else have I seen? There are many varieties of doves/pigeons, such as Crested Pigeons, which as their name implies, have a magnificent crest, much more prominent than on our Cardinals at home. Crested Pigeons love to sit on the house roofs or on wires so they are a common sight. There are also finches (such as the Red Browed Finch, which we spotted in Canberra) and of course, the totally ubiquitous House Sparrows which have been introduced to Australia just as they have back home. There is also a group of birds called Pardalotes, which have no North American equivalent. They are about the size of a sparrow with a similarly conical beak but are far more colourful than sparrows generally are. As well, there are birds called Fantails, which as the name implies, like to fan out their tails as they are hopping about in the trees. They can put on quite a display if they can sit still long enough for you to get a good look. One of the most common and endearing birds who fans his tail is the Willy Wagtail, which, as the name implies, wags his tail up and down in addition to fanning it. You see wagtails frequently in all kinds of habitats.

Before I came here, I didn’t know that Australian birds migrate, similar to our biannual migrations at home, but on a smaller scale. After all, I thought, why would they need to migrate, because Australia doesn’t have the severe winters that we have at home. Nonetheless, it’s all relative, and in the Aussie winter, things definitely do cool off, so some of the birds who don’t tolerate the cold as well do migrate north to the warmer regions. As well, some birds, such as the honey eaters, migrate as the flowers bloom seasonally. So you might see them frequently when certain plants are blooming, and then you won’t see them again until those plants bloom again several months later.

This dusky moorhen lives at Lake Albert. The waterbirds don't mind the floods!

I have to say, though, that the most exciting thing on a daily basis is to see the various types of parrots, rosellas and cockatoos, which are just a natural part of the environment. At the university in Wagga, where I have been working for a few weeks as a visiting scholar, on any given day you could see Eastern Rosellas on the lawns, Crimson Rosellas, Yellow Crimson Rosellas (which is a different race and are basically yellow instead of Crimson), Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, and Blue-winged Parrots flying about or hanging out in trees. It’s a riot of colour and sound.

But that’s Australia – it’s for the birds!

Posted in Australia, birds, Canberra, cockatoo, galah, honeyeaters, parrots, Riverina, wagga | 1 Comment

summer’s passed, it’s too late to cut the grass

Posted on March 21, 2012 by waggadventure

For a couple of years in Canada, we watched a lot of HGTV real estate programs where people were trying to sell their house. There were two main messages: 1) location location location and 2) make it look like a place people want to live. There wasn’t much a vendor could do about the first one, but ‘staging’ can make or break a deal.

When we sold our house in Edmonton, we didn’t do anything besides have the cleaner come in more frequently. Our agent assured us that everything looked fine  and our decor was good. We assumed he meant that, rather than being boring and normal, it would inspire people: “hey, honey, cool people with great taste live here, this is what I want!”  And because it was winter, Dan didn’t have to keep the lawn looking good, though potential buyers didn’t see our wonderful yard and decide to start bidding on it.

This sod was put down several months ago. Most real estate agents should realize that it grows and that someone should pay attention to it (explained below).

We don’t watch much television here, so don’t know if those types of real estate programs air here, but after our first day of open houses we don’t think they do. Staging isn’t a concept that Wagga home sellers understand. And that is just one of the quirks of local real estate that we discovered.

The first oddity is that houses are listed by multiple agents. When you look online, you see the same house advertised by different agents, sometimes with different prices. A friend who just sold her house told us you just give them a minimal fee and let them fight over who can sell it and get the commission. Wow.

Weirdness number 2 is that open houses are very short. In Canada, they are an entire afternoon, maybe even a weekend. Here, they are 30 minutes. There will be 40 to 50 open houses mid-day Saturday where people look quickly, and if they like the place they make an appointment to see it again later. So you flit around town, but if there are too many houses you are interested in seeing at the same time, you’re sort of screwed. It is strange because you get a lot of people in the house at once…your competition! And then you go, convoy-style, to the next one…and the next one…

But despite those differences, the really odd thing is the lack of, shall we say, attention to detail. To illustrate this, let’s run through what we looked at this week.

Nice house, amazing view, but the people living at the bottom of the hill might not want a sweaty and panting Dan laying on their front yard.

First house was in a neighbourhood called Hilltops, in the far south of the city (not to be confused with the Hilltops wine region, about 100 km north of Wagga). It was a nice house on top of a hill, moderate size, interesting yard with an amazing view out over the south. Like any house, there were good and bad points; among the good was the view, the size, an okay kitchen, pretty good the overall layout…among the bad, the hole for  the fridge was a bit small, laundry room would need a bit of reno to hold our appliances, and it was way up on top of a hill. Dan kept wondering how he would get home on his bike: starting a 50 km ride from that elevation would be fun, finishing it 110 minutes later…not so much!

Pop quiz. If you were selling your house, would you:

      a) clean the bathroom?
      b) get your mucky work boots out of the hall?
      c) do something about the dirty pots on the stove?
      d) all of the above?
      e) none of the above?

Most people we know would do a and c for sure, and probably b (therefore d). This place: e. It was a pig sty, but we could look past that and see that, in real estate speak, it had ‘good bones’ that just need a cleaning.

Great concept, but the cooktop and oven are both tiny, and it is only a single sink. Funky, but not practical.

Next stop was a new build just around the corner that, from the ad in the paper, looked very promising. It wasn’t as great as we thought – the builder had focused more on interesting features (a funky kitchen island, for example) than on actually making a liveable space. And the agent seemed to be working very closely with the builder…not sure of the relationship, but he kept defending all the stupid decisions “we” made, like how small the dishwasher was, how small the oven was, and how much better laminate was than timber flooring.  At least it was clean. But it didn’t look like anyone had cut the grass all season! What the hell is wrong with you people? You are trying to sell a $425 000 house, and you don’t bother cutting the (very) small yard? So, for various reasons (not the long grass, but the small stove, small sink, and no room for grapefruit trees) that one was a no.

This is just part of the outdoor living space at this house! More than we need, more than we want to spend, but pretty tempting!

We only had one other house on our agenda, so to kill time meandered through another neighbourhood we might want to live in, seeing what was open during that half hour. There were three. The first one was quite nice, but we don’t know what we would do with all the rooms. The house is in our price range, but we couldn’t afford to furnish it! It had a spectacular outdoor living area though. Next one was even bigger, and outside of our self-imposed budget. It was pretty spectacular both inside and out.

OK, the ceiling might be too low for a jump shot, but with 2 other eating areas and 2 other lounge areas inside, and huge developed outdoor areas, what else is this for?

The dining room…maybe it was a dining room…it was off the kitchen, but there was a dining table in another area…it just really had a pool table in it…was a cavernous hardwood-floored room that Dan thought would be good if we wanted to start a basketball team in Wagga! The place was massive. Third one in that neighbourhood was smaller and, having been unoccupied for a long time, pretty dumpy. At least someone was cutting the grass, but whoever was arranging for that to be done should think about getting someone inside to hoover up the dead crickets and knock down some spider webs. But, to its credit, it did have orange trees and fig trees in the back. Those are more appealing to us than a pool or a third lounge room (or even a second one!).

Last stop of the morning was on the edge of our current neighbourhood, to see a house that just went on the market. It didn’t meet the expectations we had from the ad. The 1 1/2 bathrooms were really just one bathroom and a toilet off the laundry. We need a second shower. It was inexpensive, but we would have to put about $50 000 into it to make it what we wanted. And the neighbourhood wasn’t great…

Behind this house is a great view of an ugly fence. Behind that fence: a great view of trees, paddocks, parrots, sheep...

After lunch, we walked up the hill to another new-to-market house just a couple of blocks away from where we currently live. It was OK…nothing spectacular, but we could see how we could make it liveable. The problem was that it was, again, on a hill, but for a different reason. It isn’t a huge hill; in fact, Dan often rides up it just for something to do when he is arriving home and needs another few hundred metres to reach a goal. But we had high hopes that the hill would give us a great view, and it would have were it not for the neighbour below having a pool…and therefore, by law, a high fence. And of all the possible types of fences, this one was the worst: a basic steel backyard fence, topped off with horrible bamboo. So, not only was the view blocked, it was blocked by an ugly fence that belonged to someone else and couldn’t be altered. Ugh.

What we have learned so far is that house hunting will be a long, arduous process. We know what we want, and how much we want to spend. But Wagga seems to have been built in stages: there is old, middle, and new period. Old houses are beautiful and centrally located, but to get one that has what we want (actually need: a renovated interior with modern kitchen and two bathrooms!) is way beyond our means. The middle period houses are in the ‘not-too-far-out’ suburbs, but were built in a time when everyone was procreating like mad and wanted 5 bedrooms and 3 living rooms…but one bathroom and a crappy kitchen and probably a swimming pool. Not what we want.  Some of the new houses are not bad, but they are getting toward the outskirts of the city and that means a more sterile environment with fewer trees and no parrots…sure, there are kangaroos in some of the open blocks still (saw several last week on our hunt), but as houses fill in those empty blocks those will go away too. Just like we ousted the coyotes from Terwillegar Towne…

It will probably be a couple of weeks before we get out again on an open house tour, so maybe the vendors will have had time to cut their grass and wash the windows by then.

Posted in Australia, cycling, Hilltops, kangaroo, Moving, parrots, real estate, wagga | 1 Comment

The 7% solution

Posted on March 18, 2012 by waggadventure

The house we are living in isn’t very well organized. When the removalists (or are they called replacers when they are bringing the stuff into your house?) were unpacking our stuff last August, they were a lot faster at unboxing/unwrapping than we were at putting things into the cupboards. To keep the countertops clear for them, we just stuffed things in whatever cabinet or drawer was convenient at the time. But we haven’t since rearranged any of it, so the mugs we use daily are hard to reach, our kitchen drawers are a mess, getting a glass requires a long stretch… But we haven’t bothered to put any of it away in better places because that would be admitting that we live in this house, and we don’t want to be here. It is a rental, a temporary place to stay.

We've never actually sat in this room in the rental house. The only reason it has furniture is that it is at the front of the house, so visitors see it and we don't want it to look empty.

In January, we signed a second six-month lease on this house, with a plan that by the time it ends in middle of July, we would buy our own house. A place where we will organize the cupboards, where we will actually put together the home gym that is in pieces in a back room right now. A place where we will actually use all the rooms, where we decide what goes on the walls (not just what fits on existing nails, since new holes are verboten), and where we decide the colours. A place where rather than barbecuing most nights like we are camping, we will cook proper meals [Lisa edit: yes, Dan actually said this one day – the reason he never wants to cook things like osso buco and risotto, things we made a lot in Edmonton, are because those are things you make at home and this house isn’t home]. A place where we actually live.

So we have started the process of buying a house; a couple of weeks ago, we went to talk to someone at our bank about a mortgage, and this weekend we went to a few open houses. It isn’t going to be a quick purchase, as there are some things that need to happen first, but we’re getting started.

If we owned this house, we would definitely put something on this wall.

First, we need to get some of our money from Canada. We still do some banking there, and have our retirement savings there. We might have to tap into our accounts there for our down payment. If we hadn’t had so many expenses when we first arrived, such as paying cash for our car and mobile phones, we wouldn’t have to worry. But as it is, we will have to write ourselves a cheque on our Canadian account and deposit it into our Australian account. It might take a month or so to clear. [Lisa edit: yes, we know that these are first-world problems]. But that is fine, because we can’t jump right in anyway; we are still waiting for our permanent residency application to go through. We don’t need PR status to buy a house, but 1) it makes it easier to get a mortgage and 2) there is a $7000 first-time buyer rebate (for PRs and citizens) that we can get on the ‘stamp duty’ that is applied to the purchase. So as soon as we get our status, we can save $7000!

The bank would lend us enough for this house here in Wagga, but we don't really feel like spending $1.2 million.

Because of our incomes, we won’t have a hard time getting a mortgage. The person we met at the bank did some quick number crunching and said they would give us well over $1 million. Dan said we probably didn’t need that much because we are in Wagga…she didn’t laugh. In fact, there are a few houses in the city that are in that range, and a lot in the $7-8 hundred thousand range (but we don’t want to spend more than $500 000).

Banking here is a bit odd. So is looking for a house, but we will cover that next time….for now, a bit about money.

We have 2 bank accounts: a savings account and another savings account. No chequing account, even though the first one we opened was supposed to be what we would have, in Canada, called a chequing account (where you do most of your transactions). But when we first tried to use an ATM machine, it didn’t work, and the person at our bank – they are very friendly and helpful – explained that we have a savings account. So we have no idea what a chequing account would be here. Maybe they don’t have cheques; everyone seems to transfer money in various ways through online/phone banking. When we last rented a place in Canada we had to provide a monthly cheque; here, it’s all direct withdrawal.

Our other account is called a ‘Goal Saver’ account, and it gets a really good interest rate. So good, in fact, that it is better than our GICs in Canada, and probably almost as good as our mutual funds. We are getting 5.5% interest on a bank account, as long as we deposit at least $200 per month! Wow! Our basic Canadian account might have made about 0.05%, our GICs about 1.5%. Hmm… don’t you wish that you could send us some cash to “invest” for you (wink wink, nudge nudge… Dan has his eye on a few high-end kitchen appliances, after all).

We could get this house for one sixth of the price of the one above. We think we will look somewhere in the middle of the range instead.

However, it is a case of those with money being able to make money, while those without money have to pay. Our mortgage rate will be almost 7%. That is double what we were paying in Canada. But there is another odd thing about mortgages – you can use them as savings accounts.  Say you borrow $500 000 and the required minimum payment is $2000 per month. If you pay $2500 each month, that extra $500 is yours to use if  you need it. It comes off the principal, therefore cutting the interest  you are paying, but if you need it for something you can get it back, and your principal just goes back to what it should have been. Weird. Convenient, but weird.

So the next step is to find a time to get to the bank.  Like in the olden days in Canada, banks here are open 9 to 4, Monday to Friday. This means that if you work (which you need to do to make money, which is why you need the bank in the first place!) you can’t get there and deposit a cheque from us to us (or you to us, if you’re feeling generous). We are quite sure, based on past experience, that there will be multiple steps and forms (and people) involved, as well as the requisite $10 fee for processing a foreign currency cheque. We will have to figure out how long it will take to clear and what will they even think of an international personal cheque for several thousand dollars, written by ourselves to ourselves. Sadly, because of anti-terrorism laws, it’s very difficult to move even small amounts of money across borders. For example, did you know that you can only send a wire transfer from your bank, in person, so that they can verify your identity, physically? Even if you’ve sent money previously through that branch and are using the same account numbers, etc., they must verify your identity through a multi-step process every time (same rules apply in Australia, Canada and elsewhere)! This means that if you are in another country and need to access funds, the process is near impossible (aside from pulling your daily limit on your debit card, with multiple fees, and standing at ATMs for quite some time). [Dan edit: of course, Lisa does all of this; my banking skills don’t extend past ATMs and some basic online banking.]

Once this is sorted, we can apply for pre-approval of the mortgage and start seriously house-hunting rather than just looking online, in the weekly real estate section, and a bit of lazy wandering through open houses, looking in people’s pantries and closets, and wondering why they didn’t at least cut the grass before the open house.

Posted in banking, cultural differences, real estate, wagga | Leave a comment

Summer in my mind

Posted on March 12, 2012 by waggadventure

Every year since the early 1980s, on Australia Day, Triple J radio (then called Double J…not sure what the story is there) plays the Hottest 100 songs from the year before. Australia Day, for those not in the know, is on January 26, the middle of the Australian summer. For the first 3 weeks of each year listeners around country (and now the world, thanks to the web) vote on their favourite song from the previous year. This year, it was a pretty obvious winner…the country couldn’t get enough of Gotye and Kimbra sniping at each other. And here’s a tip for readers who want to win a really great prize from us in early April: you will need to know what was number 9 this year.

Good beer? Yes. 'Craft' beer? Probably not.

For the past couple of years, The The Crafty Pint website has done a parallel poll of the Hot 100 craft beers in Australia, that they announce throughout the afternoon as JJJ plays its top songs. This year, a couple of Thirsty Crow beers made the list, which is quite astonishing because it, like the music poll, is just a popularity contest. Given that Wagga is a small city and you can’t buy Thirsty Crow beer elsewhere, it means that they rallied the troops (including us) quite well to vote in the poll. As with the Triple J poll, there was a lot of crap on the list; how anything from Coopers beer or even a James Squire can be called a craft beer is beyond comprehension, but there were a lot of beers on the list that were smaller ’boutique’ labels from major companies. For those in Canada, think Rickards…it is owned by Molsons (but then so are Granville Island and Creemore Springs…the line between micro and corporate brewery is very blurry). We like James Squire beers (have a few different ones in the fridge) but they are just a marketing ploy of a major company to sell to more discerning people.

An absolutely beautiful forecast for the next few days. Autumn in Edmonton was never like this!

The other summer hot 100 didn’t happen this year; for the first time in more than a decade, the temperature didn’t hit 38 Celsius – which, for those who think in those terms, is 100 Fahrenheit. Highest we got to was something around 37.5 C. What this means is that we didn’t have one of the hot hot hot Wagga summers that people warned us about. Most years it gets up to 40 once or twice, but not this year. People tell us we are being welcomed gently…some year, probably next year, we will get the heat. But this year has been more than tolerable, at around 4 or 5 degrees cooler than normal.

It seems odd to say that summer is over. In Canada, we based seasons on the equinoxes. Summer started on June 21, fall on September 21, winter on December 21, and spring on March 21. Officially…but if you live in Edmonton it was more like fall started in August, winter in October, spring came in May, and summer was some blip in July.

The current weather is perfect for cycling, but the rain last week destroyed one of our frequently-used trails. Yes, there was a trail across here 10 days ago.

In Australia, the seasons change at the first of the month, six months off of the northern hemisphere month. So, at the first of March, it became autumn (or do they call it fall here? We’ll have to look into that). And it was kind of suitable fall weather, cool and wet (really wet), but now we are back into great weather. The past few days have been sunny and in the high 20s, and the forecast is the same for into next week.

What is really weird is that we are actually almost also experiencing a second spring. Bottlebrush and grevillea bushes, and even some gum trees, are starting to flower again just a few months after their last cycle. It must be that they don’t flower in the heat of summer or cold of winter, but spring and fall are ideal. The moths have also returned, though in smaller numbers. Hopefully the birds that were hanging out in our yard, like the honeyeaters, will return too.

So we don’t really know what season it is, or what it is supposed to be. But compared to the Edmonton climate, it is summer in our minds.

Posted in beer, birds, cycling, rain, seasons, southern hemisphere, weather | 6 Comments