Mr Hoot

Wednesday 25th August 2010 saw Mrs Hoot and I catching the Bendigo Airport Shuttle down to Melbourne Airport. We checked in to the Hilton Hotel at the airport and then went to have good look around the shops there. Had a bit of a wander and then went back to the room and watched the planes taking off and landing from our bedroom window.

We didn’t seem to get much sleep as we were pretty excited. We got up at about 4am (half an hour before our wake-up call) and checked out. We caught the 6am Qantas flight to Sydney which left right on time,

At Sydney Airport we were met by a representative from Scenic Tours who checked our names off her list (good bit of service that). Then we had to wait 3 hours for our Air Canada flight. We mainly hung around in the departure lounge untill boarding time. We got into conversation with a Canadian couple and he gave us a Canadian dollar coin (nicknamed a ‘loonie’ because it has a picture of a loon (a diving bird) on it) and a ‘toonie’ (a $2 coin which the Canadians don’t like and the name just rhymed with the loonie!).

The flight to Vancouver was long. We dozed, ate meals(which were suprisingly good for airline food) and watched some movies. I was able to drink REAL Coke and the flight attendant left the can for me finish off – not one of those little cans either but a full-size can with bilingual writing on it!

We arrived feeling stiff and tired and were met at Vancouver airport by a shuttle. Arriving at the Fairmont Vancouver, our room wasn’t ready (it was about 8am) so we left our stuff there and went for a walk. We soon became tired and hopped on a hop-on-hop-off Bus Tour bus. Took a good look around Stanley Park and then back to the hotel where our room was now ready.

More later…

Only four days to go now before we begin our Grand Canadian tour. And because Chris has updated the blog (thanks), I thought I better do a test post.

A very quick photo of a few travel type things and a bit of text ought to do for the test.

Excitement is beginning to kick in now and again, packing and deciding what to take in the way of clothes has begun.  Everything appears to be ready!

Mrs Hoot and I are preparing for our 2010 holiday to Canada and Alaska.  We are going on a Scenic Tours extravaganza starting on August 25th.  We have booked a couple of extra days in Vancouver before we start the actual tour so we can get used to the time difference.

 I was going to make a map like Mike’s to show you all where we are going but have decided against that (because it looked crap), and am going with a printed itinerary instead.  I will probably use maps to show where we’ve been after we’ve been there…

 So without more ado, here is the itinerary:

 25^th August

Bendigo to Melbourne Airport.  Hilton Hotel Tullamarine.

26^th August

Qantas Flight to Sydney

Air Canada Flight to Vancouver.  Fairmont Hotel Vancouver.

27^th August

Vancouver.

28^th August

Vancouver.

29^th August

Vancouver.

30^th August

Rocky Mountaineer to Kamloops.  Hotel at Vendor’s Discretion.

31^st August

Rocky Mountaineer to Lake Louise.  The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise.

1^st September

Lake Louise.

2^nd September

Coach to Banff.  Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel.

3^rd September

Banff.

4^th September

Coach to Jasper.  Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge.

5^th September

Jasper.

6^th September

Coach to Sun Peaks.  Delta Sun Peaks Resort.

7^th September

Coach to Whistler.  Fairmont Chateau Whistler.

8^th September

Whistler.

9^th September

Coach and Ferry to Victoria.  Fairmont Empress Hotel.

10^th September

Victoria.

11^th September

Ferry to Vancouver.  Board ms Zuiderdam for Alaskan Cruise.

12^th September

Scenic Cruising.

13^th September

Juneau, Alaska.

14^th September

Skagway, Alaska.

15^th September

Glacier Bay, Alaska.

16^th September

Ketchikan, Alaska.

17^th September

Scenic Cruising.

18^th September

Disembark in Vancouver.  Fly Air Canada from Vancouver.

19^th September

Cross International Date Line and Miss This Day Altogether. (International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  ARGH!!!).

20^th September

Arrive Sydney.  Qantas Flight to Melbourne.  Melbourne Airport to Bendigo.

Tuesday 5th May.  ‘Twas a lovely day and so I decided to go a little further afield to do some birdwatching.  I headed for the Whipstick Forest about 20kms away from home.  The GPS didn’t help at all and in fact got me misplaced (note: not lost).  Just as I was going to give up and go home I spied a sign pointing to Bridgewater – 28 kms it said.  That’s not far I said to myself, so I headed onwards.
Bridgewater on Loddon (to give its full name) was nothing special.  The riverside parkland was quite nice but they were doing some beautification work and access was a bit restricted.  So after a few quick photos, I decided to head off in the direction of Inglewood.  It wasn’t far and I found a lovely little town with old historic buildings.  The main road was a little surprising as it was quite narrow unlike most of the other towns with their wide town centre streets.  Inglewood’s local Historical Society had been busy with blue plaques on all the old buildings, describing their stories and all about the Great Fire of Inglewood on December 3rd, 1862.  It is a sleepy little town with 2 pubs and an air of better days.  There were quite a few ramshackle shops waiting to either be leased or fall down.

From Inglewood I went on towards a place I remembered I had been before a long time ago – Melville Caves.  I drove onwards towards Kooyoora State Park where the caves are supposed to be.  There weren’t a lot of signs around and I decided that I would head for home if I didn’t find any sign of it in the next 10 minutes.  5 minutes later I found a sign and in another 5 minutes I was at the caves.
Let me say from the start, they’re not really caves; just crevices between large rounded rocks. This didn’t take away from the beauty of the area though. The land around is flat and the small ‘mountain’ where the caves are stands out prominently above the forest and fields surrounding it. I spent a lovely half an hour wandering around in the sunshine photographing the boulders. I would recommend a visit here, it’s lovely.

Then homeward along country roads stopping to take photos of a Shingleback Lizard by the side of the road.  A great day just rambling around. More photos and information about Melville Caves on Flickr

Today I became the proud owner of a shiny new set of books called the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds or HANZAB for short.  It has long been a dream of mine to own the 7 volume set.  There are actually 9 books in the set because 2 of the volumes are divided into 2 parts.  I feel like I should be wearing cotton gloves whenever I open one of them!

HANZAB is the definitive work on birds of the Australasian region.  There are 9000 pages describing 952 species which is approximately 10% of all the world’s birds.  The books are now out of print and will not be re-printed, so it was lucky that I ordered them just before that announcement was made.  As it was, the bookseller reduced the price to a lower price AFTER I had ordered them and followed up with an email reducing the price for me too.

I like Auto-focus.  It works very well most of the time.  Except today it was a complete and utter failure.  The subject was a bird (what else) called a Clamorous Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus stentoreus) and as you can imagine, they live in reeds.  They are very vocal little birds but very hard to see, especially when they are in a thick bed of reeds.  My camera didn’t like those reeds.  The focus went crazy.  So I flipped my switch to manual and actually got a reasonable photograph.
It’s funny how much you rely on automation when you probably most often don’t need to.  You can see what I mean in the following photo.

Yesterday another ‘lifer’ was added to my birdlist.  A juvenile Red-capped Robin (Petroica goodenovii) visited us, sitting just about a metre outside the back garden fence.  Again not a rare bird but one to add to my list.  Was a cute little thing too.

For the last couple of days a Common (feral) Pigeon (Columbia livia) has been coming to our garden.  Not too much unusual about that.  Trouble is that he is on his own and feeling, how can I say this – somewhat frisky.  With no one of his own kind around, he has been bowing and cooing to the Crested Pigeons (Ocyphaps lophotes) and the Common Bronzewings (Phaps chalcoptera). Of course neither of these other two species will have anything to do with him.

But he still keeps on trying…

Back in February 2006, I started a group on Flickr called ‘Australian Birds‘.  There was no group already running that seemed to cater for this subject.  I didn’t really expect much from the group at that time.
Now, this weekend, the group has 1,000 members and nearly 19,000 photos.  I am very happy the way things have gone.  Only very occasionally have I had to delete a photo, and that was only because someone had put one on by mistake. I did have to limit the number of photos per day a little while ago to stop members flooding the group with dozens of pics.

Yesterday saw me begin Project 365.  This is a project to take a photo each day for a year.  The pictures are uploaded to Flickr every day (hopefully).
I have been threatening to do this project for a while and now I have finally begun. Cheers to everyone for their encouragement (and nagging) to get this off the ground.  Bets are being made as to the number of bird shots that I upload!
The photoset can be found here on Flickr.