Arrived in Sydney

What a long trip to get halfway across the globe. It was about 30 hours of travel from my house to Sydney via Atlanta and Los Angeles. The flight from LA was tolerable, but not enjoyable. I did have an exit row seat, but the evacuation slide was stored in my leg space, so I had to be creative about stretching out.

I arrived at 6:15 am local time, and my host, Anna Dawes, was very nice to get up so early in the morning to fetch me. It took about an hour to get through immigration and customs. My woodturnings had to be inspected, of course.

Alain Mailland is staying with the Dawes' from the night before I arrived. His tool bag made it with him from Singapore, but not his clothes bag. That should come today before we head up to newcastle.

To keep me up all day, Anna took Alain and I on the ferry to Sydney. It was a cool, drizzly kind of day. On the way down the river we stayed up front and the stiff breeze woke me up quite a bit.

We visited the Sydney Museum, the botanical garden, and then the art museum. The botanical garden has an exhibit on the Wollemei pine right now. This is a pretty cool thing because the pine was thought to be extinct when the dinosaur's died out. A small grove of the pines was discovered up in a remote and rugged area of the Blue Mountains several years ago, and the garden collected some of the seed cones to try to propagate the pines. It worked and they have a small grove of young plants at the garden and up for auction on Sotheby's.

Staff from the herbarium at the garden help out with the exhibit, answering questions and the like. I met Peter Weston, a plant systematist who works on orchids, and who knows my colleague, John Freudenstein, at OSU. We got to talking and I told him I'd be in the area throughout next week. I made arrangements to use the herbarium collection and then to give a research seminar on next Wednesday. He walked us over to the herbarium and I checked out the collection of Euphrasia and other plants I'm interested in seeing, and there's quite a large collection. I'll look at it more thoroughly next week. Cool!

I did manage to stay up until nine pm local time, and then I was able to get some sleep. I'm feeling ok at the moment, but I'm sure I'll crash later today - maybe on the ride up to Newcastle. The collaboration 2005 conference starts tonight and goes to Monday afternoon. I probably won't have internet access until next week, but I'll post pictures when I can.

Until then, I'll post several pictures from the excursion into Sydney.