From November 2009 to September 2010 Tyler and Paula will be on a grand adventure. We have lent our house to another family who need a place to live while they are building a new house, and we have hit the road. New Zealand, Australia, Texas (!), Ireland, Scotland, England, and Japan are planned.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Melbourne in the Rain

Tuesday, December 8, 2009     Melbourne, Australia

We sailed (actually, "dieseled") from Sydney Sunday evening and plowed through the open ocean at about 18 knots all night, all day Monday, and arrived in Melbourne Tuesday morning.  We intended to do just two things:  visit the Victoria State Library to take advantage of its free internet, and visit the Royal Botanic Gardens, with a possible side trip to the nearby Melbourne Cricket Fields, world-reknowned among those familiar with the Sport of the Commonwealth and strongly recommended to us by our good friend David who is a native of New Zealand.  Sorry, David!  It was raining all day long, and we didn't even make it to the Royal Botanic Garden, let alone the bloody cricket field!  We didn't intend to hang out all day at the Library, but that's what happened.  It was Tyler's fault.  He started a file synchronization with his Apple MobileMe iDisk account (anybody know what I'm talking about?).  Tragically there was an awful bottleneck somewhere in the system and it took forever - - well, actually, about 4 hours, and even after that long it still wasn't finished so we just cut the cord and did a forced shutdown.  "Yanks' Melbourne Holiday Ruined by Enslavement to Computer"




We will spend a good week or so back in Melbourne after we leave New Zealand at the end of March, on our way back to the US.  It's a great city, and I think we will like it better then Sydney.

Here's a picture of Tyler huddled on the small veranda at the stern of the ship on our deck 7 (of 10).


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About Us

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Midland, Michigan, United States
Tyler is a retired research scientist (PhD Chemistry, University of Illinois) who worked for The Dow Chemical Company. The last 16 years of his career he served as grants and contracts manager for Dow's External Technology program, involving Dow sponsored research grants to universities, government research contracts into Dow, and a variety of other industry/university/government research partnerships. Paula is a botanist with graduate work in plant taxonomy. She worked as a microbiology research assistant for four years while Tyler was in graduate school, then led a busy life raising 3 kids, gardening, and serving in a variety of church ministries and activities.