Day Trip to Stanthorpe - Night 13

Our task for this first week here would be to take a small 500-foot path through the woods and turn it into a meter-wide hiking highway full of stairs and topped with crushed red granite. Work on this job began very well and ended the same. The team easily split into groups of two, some charging ahead to clear a meter wide path, other pulling up all the rocks and some of us staying back to build the stairs and lay the gravel. Most of my morning was spent behind a wheelbarrow bringing load upon load of gravel down unto the path. It reminded me of wheeling concrete back during my Miron days. In the afternoon, a new line of wheelers took over and I switched to building stairs out of rocks. The bedrock here is exposed in many places and consists primarily of weathered rhyolite that is horizontally stratified. This is very good for trail building, as large flat stones are very commonly strewn about and are easily laid into place as steps for the trail. Lifting and moving rocks all day we came across a number of centipedes, scorpions and geckos, not to mention plenty of non-venomous spiders.

We finished up around 2:30 and packed up and headed into town for some supplies. Stanthorpe is about a 30 minute drive from Dragonweyr, just long enough to air out our stinky bodies. My main goal in town was to find some sandals after my mishap on the train last weekend. Though Stanthorpe is a small farming town it has a very nice downtown shopping district, including a Target Country, the store’s small town, main street type store. Inside I found some sandals and assorted toiletries for half the price of what we had been paying in Brisbane. Shopping here almost makes Australian prices seem reasonable. While we were in town we also stocked up on beer for the week. The rules of our volunteer program strictly prohibit alcohol on the job, but our team leader allows it in moderation, so long as everyone behaves and no one tells the superiors. A 30-pack of Carlton Mid (my second favorite Aussie brew to date, behind Toohey’s New) was had for $40.

After our pasta dinner we all sat around the table and played two truths and one lie, a camping game where each person has to tell two true things and one lie about themselves and the others have to guess which one is the lie. It is a great way to learn strange nuances about other people you have just met.

What I Learned Today: Our group, and likely all humans in general, enjoys working to a much greater extent when there is a clear goal in sight and progress is easily visible. Last week while cutting cat’s claw at Reedy Creek Ranch, morale was fairly low as there was no end in sight and progress was tough to monitor. Here at Dragonweyr, our goals are easily marked and the visualization of progress is quite obvious. As a result, everyone worked much harder today and the time passed much more quickly. I think we are all looking forward to the next two weeks of work, rather than dreading them.

written by  exumenius on October 23, 2007 from Stanthorpe, Australia
from the travel blog: Kiwis and Kangaroos
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