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Published: January 24th 2009
Nice View
This is the landscaped garden and entrance to the visitors centre.DAY 77 (Week 11)
We left Dubbo this morning, and had the option to go to Dubbo jail and have a look around, then on to have our challenge match of mini golf. We decided to skip the jail as we do need to ensure that we work within the budget we have set ourselves, it is easy to get carried away, so instead headed straight out of town to the mini golf course that is sited on the same piece of land as Dubbo Observatory, the tourist brochure said both were open, Friday Saturday and Sunday every week.
We were both psyched resorting to our usual tactics of abuse and intimidation, neither was going to show any weakness, neither was prepared to loose.
We arrived at the mini golf course and it was closed! I said to Caroline shall we drive back in to town and go and she the jail and she said, no we may as well make our way to Parkes. She was miffed, saying that it must be a conspiracy.
I really believe Caroline and myself are hard workers, her, the brains of our operation and me the looks. We had built
our hopes and dreams of coming to Australia, even if we decided it would only be for a years adventure, it was something we worked hard for.
Every night in the UK we would go to bed and talk about the adventure, and we both always said what we wanted to do when we got over here, and it always included going back to “The Dish” at Parkes.
Lying on my hospital bed at Southampton General I couldn’t believe it, I had had a heart attack and I thought our dreams lay in tatters, how unfair this was when we worked so hard and wished so much, and how unfair on Caroline that “I” had shattered her dreams.
We drove to the radio telescope at Parkes today, we had been here 2 years before, the film “The Dish” is based around the historic story of this fantastic structure all 1000 tonnes of Steel. When we got around 10 Kilometres away from the site of the telescope you could see it pointing towards the heavens as a trusty sentinel constantly increasing our knowledge of the solar system in which we live.
As we were driving along close
The Dish
Our old friend, our hopes and dreams were being created at this site in 2007. to the telescope we were listening to the soundtrack of the Dish, and I heard faint snuffles from Caroline, when I looked over her eyes were full of tears and I asked her what the matter was.
She said that it seemed that our dreams had been built around this icon of engineering, and our passion for the stars, and when I had my heart adventure, she thought she was going to loose me, and after so much hoping and waiting it was an emotional release, sort of the end, or even beginning of the of an emotional journey.
My 3 months off work getting fit was a time that I concentrated on putting our dreams back together, I’m just glad to have as second chance.
We parked the truck, and went in to the visitors building, I was hoping they may have had the visitors register from 2007, and see where we all signed it last time but they didn’t. It had changed somewhat in 2 years, “The Dish” looked as fantastic as ever, but the visitors centre was a bit more glitzy than I remember and this time it had a coffee shop.
Let
Engineering Excellence
Engineering that allows us to scan the universe and beyond me tell you about our fascination with “The Dish”
Built in 1961 at Parkes in the middle of a sheep paddock, it was chosen from a100 site to be sited there because the location was flat, and the atmospheric conditions were perfect, for radio astronomy
It has a 64 meter diameter Dish, commissioned 31st October 1961 and the signal converges 27 meters above the reflector, at the cab. It weighs 1000 tonnes and was built by Machinenfabrik Augsburg Nurnburg (M.A.N) from Germany who now make trucks. What makes this telescope really famous is this; When Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin set foot on the moon., on 21st July 1969 the first 8 minutes of voice and audio telemetry came in via honeysuckle creek in California, then as the radio telescope at Parkes was in the perfect alignment with the moon, it became the prime receiving station for the next 2 ½ hours of images from the moon, and to this day Parkes (CSIRO) and Nasa have worked together for all the moon, mars and research missions.
As I have said many times before, putting man on the moon was the pinnacle of human endeavour and triumph.
Giant Bird Bath
You want to see the size of birds tht bath in this bird bath. We spent a couple of hours mooching around the site and reminiscing of being there with Gary and Karen in 2007.
We came away from the site with the intention of going back in the late evening to get some dusk, then night shots of the telescope, we had asked if this was OK and the woman in the visitors centre said you can visit the dish 24/7 though the buildings are locked after 4.30.
Our next call was Parkes where we again needed the services of that well known burger chain to upload the blog for day 76 dated 22 01 2009, as we like to get it loaded for our friends for when they get up, based on 11 hours in front of UK time.
One of our favourite bit is looking at the statistics to see how many people are reading the blog, and this afternoon was 1833 hits (for January), the other part of the blog we like is uploading our pictures, as 1 good picture tells 1000 words.
Back in the truck, Parkes is becoming distant in the rear view mirror and Forbes is getting closer, Forbes is a place
Wind Meter
If you only knew how important this meter was.
(Watch the Film) we have never been to, and are looking forward to the prospect of arriving there.
Forbes is a biggish town with 10,000 people, quaint and old fashioned in a way. We find a big 4 camp site, and book a place for a couple of nights, its nice and quite, not many kids around as it is coming up to the end of the school holidays, so its peace at last, bah humbug !!
We go out for dinner, something we haven’t done for probably 10 weeks since being in Brisbane, we find a nice restaurant called the Spice of life (NOT INDIAN) and sit down to a great meal, the end to a perfect day.
An Emotional Journey I am not sure that I really realised the significance of this short journey to Parkes today which seems to have become such and icon for our Australian Adventure. It all started a good few years ago when Andy brought a DVD home for us to watch one Sunday afternoon. I thought to myself that it did not look that exciting, just another boring film about astronauts and Apollo's! I was very wrong, it was an excellent film
"Long and Winding Road"
Traffic over here is a problem, there are so many dangerous bends and we both had a good laugh that afternoon.
A year or so later we had decided to go to Australia for a holiday with Gary and Karen, both of us saying that we needed to review the maps and decide where we wanted to go, naturally I included The Dish for Andys benefit, not so much mine. Then getting together with Gary and Karen one weekend we set down a plan to include as much of our travel desires as possible.
After our holiday in Australia and sometime after we had applied for visa's we bought the DVD and would watch it to give us a bit of inspiration and hope in getting our visas in order to embark on this adventure. We watched it so many times, we could almost recite the script.
That day I got the phone call from Andy, my world stopped, I knew this one was serious from the tone in Andy's voice. While Andy was lying in A&E getting checked out he started to fret about Australia and said that this would stop us from going, he was more worried about shattering my dreams. From my side of the hospital
On Patrol
Just a good shot of our truck and trailer bed I had a different picture, I was more worried about losing my husband. I said to him "what will be will be", if getting Andy through this in one piece had meant losing our dream of Australia, then it was a small sacrifice. We would just consider a different adventure.
If you have been through this (or something similar) then you will know how it truly feels, your world stops and nothing else seems to matter, everyone else carries on around you as normal, but why shouldn't they? Life does have to continue, it is a way that ensures that you have hope and that other peoples normal activity brings you out of that shell that you have been encased in. My parents were away in India, we had taken the decision not to tell them as we did not want to ruin their holiday, so for the first time in my life I was facing this alone. We were both lucky enough to have exceptionally good friends around to support me through such a difficult time, and I can't thank them enough for that, except to say that I would do the same for them, but it
is harder now I am on the other side of the world.
Through that time we listened to the soundtrack and watched the film and hoped upon hope that our visa would be granted and I really had not considered that it was forming part of this emotional journey, until today when we got closer to "The Dish", listening to the soundtrack and all of a sudden a huge wave of emotion washed over me that I could not control and now maybe that the emotional journey had come full circle and formed some closure.
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Babs
non-member comment
"The Dish"
Well that was emotional.... cant believe that I have cried reading your blog today! You are both an inspiration to anyone who has got dreams .... I am so happy that you are both living it, you deserve it. Carry on having fun. Lots of love, Babs x