Hey everyone! Anna speaking. It’s hard to believe it has been over a month since we were traveling the coast of Australia. The quick turnaround to leave that beautiful place and my friends had me struggling for a long time to accept that we were really home. I know I share these feelings with a lot of my group, and a lot of the world right now, as we try to grasp onto normal, miss our friends and family, and remember how to be on our own. These last few weeks have been my time to try to do these things while I continue to learn with my group about the environment and culture of Australia. Being back in the beautiful Minnesota spring has been helping too. While looking at photos of places we could have gone to is a bit hard, every time I do I am reminded of each experience I did have in my time in New Zealand and Australia. Every one of them was a little microcosm of life, filled with so much emotion, friendship, growth, and new knowledge, I feel like my time there was truly endless.
One of my favorite evenings in Australia was one night while at Bimbi Park in Cape Otways, when our group got to go on a glow worm walk with Mike, our teacher for the time we were at Bimbi. We walked for over an hour in the pitch black, holding hands like we were on a preschool field trip through the wet forest and over the boardwalks. As we wandered aimlessly following Mike, he pointed out the shells of giant ancient trees and many types of fungi and animals in the woods. It reminded me of our New Zealand glowworm experience in the cave floating below them, but this time we were much closer and in a less touristy environment. Although we were on a popular walking trail, the darkness and my unfamiliarity with the area made my experience of these tiny wonders much more personal. The soil banks alongside the trail lit up with constellations of glow worms, the more our eyes adjusted, the more we saw. Mike taught us a bit more about why glow worms were in the area. Glow worms like wet environments but there is no strong pattern to reported glow worm sightings. The good thing is that they are great at finding the moisture and cooler temperatures they need to thrive during the 9-month larval stage, and the Otways is the perfect place for them. We laid under the stars for a while after ending our walk and coming into a clearing. I remember thinking that I had never had so much fun stumbling over tree roots in the dark or stepping in mud puddles before. I think that learning through experience with our group made me appreciate where I was so much more and enhanced my ability to take in new information. I’ll never forget how much fun I had learning as we traveled through New Zealand and Australia. Learning with and from a group of passionate, creative, and caring stewards of the environment provides a whole new type of understanding.
We didn’t disturb the glow worms with our cameras, but we did take cheesy pictures inside a huge hollowed out fallen tree. It was hundreds of years old, extended all the way down a hill, and was an enticing photo-op.
-Anna
Hometown Reunion and Looking Closely
Looking back from the predictability of stay-at-home Minnesota, our time in New Zealand and Australia is a chaotic blur of food, friends, education, laughter, and of course beautiful scenery. The days all run together in my head and I still can’t put together a timeline of the trip without referring back to my itinerary but memories with my friends, lifechanging lessons, and the amazing natural places we visited are seared into my brain forever. After watching the setting sun shining on Mount Cook, snorkeling among jellyfish, riding waves into picturesque beaches, and falling asleep under a new sky, I expected the parks in my hometown of Duluth to feel drab and boring. Instead, I’ve realized that the parks around me have a different purpose in my life and that I’ll never run out of new things to explore in them.
View of Mount Cook at sunset
I’m lucky to live within walking distance of four city parks. The kind of parks that make you forget you can walk home in five minutes or climb a small hill and look over the city. My entire life I’ve walked and run in these parks and every bit of trail is full of memories with friends, family, and just me. Instead of wondering what I’ll see around the next turn like I did while abroad, I think about walks with my siblings and runs with my dad.
A small footbridge over a waterfall in lower Chester
On the trip, I only got a snapshot of each place at one point in time. Back home, I can watch the parks change with the seasons but also change over the years. In Chester park, the pond at the bottom of the ski hill is gone and you can see where old trails dead end into the creek, changes from the flood 8 years ago. In Hartley, so many trees fell in a windstorm that an entire section of one of my favorite loops was closed for good. You can still bushwhack your way through and find saplings sprouting from the trail and up through the boardwalks.
These parks aren’t new to me, but I will never run out of things to explore in them. An emphasis of our field journal was to slow down and look closely at the little things. There are countless things that I have seen a thousand times but never really looked at.
Today I went on a run that turned into a walk that turned into me taking pictures of the melting snow. It still surprises me how the same old scenery can grab me and show me new things. I ended up spending a long time standing on a rock in the creek looking at a small cliff. The cliff was covered in ice at the top with bright green moss underneath. The water was dripping off points in the ice into the mat of moss below and everything was sparking in the sun. Between the moss, the ice, the sun, the sound of the creek, and the smell of spring, the scene was as captivating as a New Zealand beach.
Water dripping from a stick on to moss
-Sean