I’m now at the tail end of my flight to Melbourne, breakfast is about to be served and we are set to land in 1 hr 45 mins. It looks to be a quick flight (relatively) It was scheduled to land 6.45 and we’re currently looking at 5.50. Should give me time to get my duty free and hopefully some coffee in the Qantas Club before boarding for Perth. Anywho, picking up Sunday morning. After not enough sleep I woke up, transferred my washing to the dryer got ready and headed over to the Closing Ceremony i was running a bit late, but I forgot that there’s always the 15 min pre ceremony video so it was fine.
The ceremony was a bit shorter than usual which was good, it always takes a while to get through all of the results. Australia had some good results in the top 10 of many competitions. After that it was driving bak to housing pack up say goodbye and get ready to go. It took me a bit longer this time but I wasn’t ready to leave until right on 1 (when we had to be out). This wasn’t a big deal as I couldn’t get into my accommodation until 4 and it was less than a 2 hour drive.
After saying farewell and see you next year I headed back to target to stock up on some tanning oil/sunscreen products that they just don’t seem to have in Australia 😞 Then I visited the Starbucks at Target and got one of my pretty standard orders – Iced latte and pumpkin loaf. I worked out a route that took me a bit past my accommodation but landed me at Walmart and near another Starbucks! At Walmart I was looking for more tanning oil/sunscreen products as Target didn’t have what I wanted. I had slightly more luck at Walmart although not exactly what I was after. Then I went to Starbucks and this time got one of my other favourite orders – Strawberry Açai Refresher with Lemonade. Then across to Turkey Run State Park arriving at my accommodation about 15 mins after checking opened 😉
You may recall that I visited there last year although I was only there for an hour or two and I wanted to spend more time. I even posted some pictures from last year if you look back through my posts. This is where I was staying and few shots of my room.
The planning of my US holidays is always a little bit challenging. I want to make the most of my time, but IC also takes some time to recover from. It’s a tricky balance knowing what to do after IC as I want to do touristy stuff but I also want to rest and sleep! At any rate I decided to try and make the most of my time so I picked a couple of the shorter hikes to do and headed off. It had rained a lot recently and as a lot of the trails are old stream beds it was very muddy & wet, but still very beautiful. My next post will include some photos. Even though the weather was fairly mild at 25 degrees you can still work up a pretty good sweat. According to my apple watch tracking I did 1.85km and gained 61m of altitude on that hike.
I got back to my room, showered and headed down to have dinner at the on site restaurant. I arrived just before 7, knowing they closed at 8, but apparently being a Sunday they closed early. I couldn’t get what I wanted but I managed to get take away soup and salad bar which wasn’t to bad and I ate in my room. I wasted way to much time trying to get my devices to talk to the TV and in the end gave up and watched Chicago Fire on my iPad! Then it was a fairly early night as I was still pretty tired.
I’m currently on my flight to LA (yes that is strange, you’ll have to keep reading to learn more about that later). I’ve just finished the two previous posts and I have 1 hour 20 mins til we land so I figure I’ll try and bust out one more entry now. Saturday morning I woke up feeling relatively refreshed and a lot better health wise. I showered and went down for breakfast (the one and only time, but I think that’s once more than last year!) I did have food in my room so I had been eating other food. I procrastinated a bit but by 9 am decided I had to start on my last packet. I think it was 7 booklets? I thought I could bust them out pretty fast and as they were MAGICs I was getting through them at around 25mins a booklet which is a pretty good pace.
As I was getting close to the end Suz, Simon and I started messaging to see if we could organise catching up for lunch. They were both free and I had almost finished so we decided that I would pick up Suz and drive downtown where Simon was and have lunch there. That worked well and we found a place to eat. After that Simon and I went off together to explore more of the markets. I hadn’t planned on buying gifts but upon seeing a sauce shop I couldn’t pass it buy. I brought three bottles of bum scorcher (the hottest variety of hot sauce) for two of my friends and a bottle of bum warmer (mid range) sauce for me. We also stopped in at a sweat shop and samples sum very yummy albeit expensive chocolates.
Back to campus and then got a lift to the Community Projects (former CmPS) showcase. We didn’t have long before it shut, but we did manage to get around to all the Australian Teams, get a photo and hear a bit about their projects. The Suz when off to her special person dinner and Simon and I walked round to the dining hall to get dinner and I only got slightly wet from the rain. Walking back to the accommodation after dinner was a different story – we got very wet! We decided we didn’t have time for the rain to stop so just went through it and then changed when we got back.
A quick shower and change and then we headed off the variety show. As always it was very enjoyable although I don’t think there were any stand out acts. There were a couple of performances by Australians. I think there was more dancing than singing this year. I usually prefer the latter, but that’s ok. After that it was off to the dance. The glowsticks were a big hit but I think the music choice wasn’t as good this year and the DJ didn’t want to take request and didn’t really look at the list Paige and I added requests to.
It was back to housing and final night party time. There was a good group of us and we have fun, drinks and good discussion. I put a load of washing on and was in bed by about 2.30am. Well that’s Saturday night and almost the end of IC – always sad. I’ll finish this post here as we may as well do all of Sunday all together. As I said’s it’s a shorter trip so with two flights to go I might even finish the blog account before I land in Perth.
Still no pictures, but there are some coming in future posts I promise.
Well I awoke on Thursday and I definitely had a sore throat – not ideal. I decided that I was going to skip the opening ceremony and try to get some additional rest and hopefully feel a little better. I’m glad that i had packed precautionary medicine and the extra rest helped a little. It was then time for the evaluator meting. Lunch was supposed to be provided but never eventuated which was a bit sad. We did the typical FS reading, let’s call it ‘vigorous discussion’ rather than arguing and practice UP scoring. There was a fair bit of talking so the meeting when for a file but we finished just before 4pm and had to be back at 6pm for shout outs.
My evaluation had me down for 2 packets of middle team booklets (16 booklets, later down to 15 due to one critical error) due by 4pm Friday so it was quite a lot to do given that middle shouts outs take the longest so we didn’t get to start evaluating til after 8pm. So 20 hours to do 15 evaluations and get any sleep possible. I made a start but I wasn’t very productive as I was super tired. I decided I had to sleep first so I got maybe 5 hours or a bit less, though it wasn’t great sleep knowing I had work to do. At 3am I knuckled down and started working through the booklets. Knowing I could finish by 4 if I evaluated a booklet in about 50 minutes. This is usually pretty doable but the IC standard is hight or at least they wrote a lot and IC still require some comments albeit briefer than normal. I mostly got through it anyway and finished about 4.15 which Kyla, Emily and I all agreed was close enough.
It was almost time for dinner which to my delight was Chik fil a. Kyla and Emily said to take a break and see how I felt after dinner if there were any jobs. As my cough had started (but sore throat mostly cleared thankfully) I took the opportunity to duck down to Target and pickup some cough medicine. This time my Australian ID was sufficient to let me purchase it. I enjoyed my Chik fil a for dinner and then went back to see Emily. I said i thought i had about an hour of brain power if she had jobs for me. In the end I agreed to do another packet of individuals – 7 booklets. I said I probably wouldn’t have the done by the individual deadline 8pm but should have them done by 9. In the end they did my head it, they weren’t good booklets – they seemed to keep forgetting to use the FS. I suspect my tiredness also didn’t help. At any rate I got them finished around 10pm and Emily was very appreciative. My initial plan was to make a start on my remaining assignment – a packet of senior MAGICS but I was too tired to decided to go to sleep and start fresh in the morning. That takes us to Friday night.
