De’s Birthday – Hip Hip Hooooray!
I was again woken at some silly hour shivering and shaking,
but without the assistance of yesterdays rooster, so the heater was cranked up.
The boys were told 7am at the absolute earliest but around 6:30 they were down
on Jack’s bunk planning something, so I went to investigate finding same
tearing pages into confetti to shower De in. I quickly put a stop to that and
left them to whatever their other plans were. At 7 on the dot they were up
trying to plug Jack’s Ipod into the vans stereo system and even with my
assistance we couldn’t get it to work. They had found a Happy Birthday song on
You tube, complete with karoke style words, and played it for De on the Ipod.
Next was the dispensing of presents. While we walked around
Lawn Hill national park a few weeks ago we had come up with a list of goodies.
Usually you get ‘things’ but instead De got home made vouchers as not only was
it almost impossible to find a pair of running shoes in Burketown, Normanton,
Karumba, Cloncurry or Julia Creek but I didn’t like the chance of us returning
them if they were the wrong size or colour! Part of the plan was also for De to
have a pedicure in the afternoon, as a surprise, but the only problem was there
isn’t even a hair dresser in Richmond let a lone a beauty salon! I did however,
after half a dozen shops coving a thousand kilometres eventually find a new set
of winter PJs that we could give to her today, and they were even gift wrapped
which is a novelty in our household!
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| What every mother wants for her birthday....to be dog piled! |
The boys and I made French Toast with bacon and maple syrup
sprinkled with icing sugar for the birthday girl and then headed for
Kronosaurus Korner (KK). KK is an amazing ‘dinosaur’ centre that the locals
have set up and run. In the late 1970’s they discovered an almost complete
Kronosaurus on one of the local properties. A boffin from Havard Uni in the USA
came over, dug him up and took him back with him where he still is today. Fast
forward thirty years and a local grazier was out mustering cattle and he
noticed a funny looking rock/thing sticking out from the side of a creek bank,
he kicked it but it didn’t budge so he dug around it pulling a bit out. Even at
his first glance he could tell it was something a bit unique so he sent it off
to the QLD museum for review. He had sent them a nose and a week later he had a
pile of boffins crawling over the creek bed digging up the rest of the most
complete Kronosaurus fossil ever discovered!
Amazingly enough a week later he
also managed to find one of the best examples of a Minmisaur ever found, and it
took the paelentologist only a day to extract the whole fossil!!
We spent a good three hours looking at the exhibits in the
centre enjoying every word of the self guided audio tour. Since these finds
many locals have learnt a lot about paleontology and many of them have found
significant fossils in their day to day life on their properties.
It was lunch time so we
sent De on her way while we went to the bakery to get lunch. When we were in SA
we had pie floaters and De loved them so I went about recreating them. I had
looked up a few recipes on the internet for the mushy peas, with most of them
coming from split peas that had been soaked overnight, which was going to
pretty hard to do and keep a secret. When I dropped into the bakery yesterday
to order 4 pies I asked them about how they do their mushy peas and after
finding out what I was up to Deb, the super nice lady, agreed to do up a big
batch of mushy peas for me!!! So we grabbed our supplies and after heating up
the peas and constructing the floaters we presented them to the very surprised
birthday girl. They weren't nearly as good as the SA ones but I am sure with a few more practice runs they will get better!
After a little snooze the
boys and I put the lamb shanks on the webber, grabbed our paleontology
equipment and headed the to the ‘dig site’ 12 kilometres north of town leaving
De to have some quite time. KK had supplied us with a sheet which would help us
identify the fossils when we found them, the only problem was it didn’t tell us
how to find them. So there we were standing in the middle of an old disused
quarry hoping to find a few 100 million year old things. My hope was that we
would find someone there who knew what they were doing, but we were all alone.
Plan B was to find where other people had been digging and look there. For 20
minutes we wondered around in circles in the scrub and having found no evidence
of any other digs I was starting to wonder if somebody was having a lend of me.
We got the shovel out and made a couple 5cm deep holes and surprisingly enough
we didn’t find anything! We wondered on and eventually found an area where
others had been so we started digging looking at the rocks as we dug them up. It was pretty frustrating to say the least as
the boys were really keen to find a fossil but I nothing to help them.
Eventually Jack managed to find a rock that had something that resembled
fossils! YEAH!! I wasn’t positive but was pretty sure we were close enough to
satisfy them!
We dug for a while and
decided it might be worth heading to the other dig site to see if anybody was
there. When we arrived there was 5 or 6 cars with a group of people crowded
around a real palaeontologist, who we had seen a KK in the morning. I quickly
realised that all the people were on a paid dig so we kept our distance to see
what they were doing and hopefully copy them. Gary, the palaeontologist then
invited the boys over to break apart some of the ‘fish mash’ he was digging up.
To find the fossils he was using a ‘wrecking bar’ to chisel up a layer of rock
and then turning it over and 9/10 times there was a fossil of some kind exposed. From
fish scales, jaws and teeth to dinosaur poo and the cartilage part of dinosaur
squid. It was pretty cool! Often layers of the rocks were quite soft, the fish
mash, and could be broken up in your fingers so Gary would hand us a chunk and
we would crumble it up to see what we could find, and find we did! It is pretty
cool to be able to find the tooth of a shark that fell out 100 million years
ago!
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| Our awesome haul for the day! |
Happy with our haul we
headed back to camp to show De. We had the shanks that had been slow cooking
for 4 hours with some creamy mash and a couple of nice wines for dinner
followed up with a birthday cake. Sam had wanted to put 42 candles on the cake
but I managed to sway him by getting a fancy musical candle that played happy
birthday. When De was cutting the cake Sambo pushed De’s hand down ensuring it
hit the plate so she had to give me a kiss! Thanks Sambo!!!
It was toooo cold to sit
outside so when we put the boys to bed we lay on the bed reading and sipping
our wines to finish off what had been a great day!
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