Vollie Day 15: Warm Trees

This was a fun and quiet morning, with the company of another guide.  I gave two small tours to some people who couldn't walk very far, and we were able to find things to talk about while sitting inside the windows, looking out over the auditorium.

The warm trees exhibition is up too, here's something from the ABC about it:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/canberrans-warm-trees-and-revegetate-landscape-on-national-tree/5627178

Toasty

Vollie Day 14: Yarn bombing

I forgot to write about last week: not many tours to do as I had a fellow vollie also walking the floor, but I had a lot of fun looking after some kids whose folks had run out of ways to entertain them.  We tried to magic-fix the busted interactive map (no that doesn't work) and then I made up a kids-version tour, which is like the adults tour but with more gross stories.

This week I had a guiding shift in the morning, when I talked two groups into getting out into the forests and they pretended that they actually might (good of them).  We also have a school holidays activity running to get kids to knit some scarves and put some French knitting together: in a couple of weeks we'll yarn-bomb a couple of forests and use the French knitting that the kids do to decorate the playground.

Bless em

Vollie Day 12: The Biggest Yet

Today I took both the morning and afternoon shifts, and I was on my own, and the sunshine really came through for us, so we had a huge crowd through.  I took eight tours through: from a group of one guy on his own to a large group of thirteen people travelling together.  I'm pretty sure that I came through for all of them, but had to remember to stick to the script, or I'd tell a group the dragon story twice, or not at all about the forests.  I'm pretty sure that I sold a few people on some short walks out amongst the Himalayan Cedars and the Cork Oak, or at least into driving out via Dairy Farmers Hill.  Today was my best guiding yet: I'm really glad for that because it had kind of bored me this month.  Now I only need to stay committed to learning more about the forests: I should start with at least a few of the forests that are within view of the Village Centre.

Good questions:

• How big is the Arboretum?  (250 hectares (617 acres)
• Is there an orchardist specialist on staff to care for the harvestable forests, to ensure that they don't get and spread disease to agricultural areas? (Yes, the health of the trees is the responsibility of the wonderful horticultural team - this includes managing crops and seed collection.  Our volunteers help them all the time in working bees and in preparing for harvesting.)

Vollie Day 11: Chills

Winter wasn't going to show up - April and May were spectacularly warm, but there has finally been some frost in the last couple of weeks.  This morning was a good day to be inside.  I got to chat with a couple of groups of people about the apparently sparse forests, as they're almost all dormant now.  A lovely family holidaying from Sri Lanka even took a lot of pictures of us all.

Over the last week, the staff and volunteers have put the winter coats on the dragon trees, and people are even less inclined to venture outside.  Still, there was a large group on their way to the very south end of the Arboretum, and good health to them.

Vollie Day 10: Buddies

I'm approaching the end of my leave, and really starting to schedule in the volunteer days.  Today was a rainy one, and an artist group set up in the corner, out of the wind and the rain.  Chickens.  

Yeah I don't know why they can't turn the lights on

The morning shift was super-dooper quiet: neither of us on the shift took a tour group until my guide buddy left.  Of course this was just before my out-of-towner friends arrived and we'd set up a tour for 12:00, so I told my friends to wait by the sign and if we were lucky, we could disappear after waiting around for a few minutes.  The fifteen people showed up... so I sped them through the least-enthusiastic presentation I've given (so far) and tried to get my friends on the road for their eight-hour drive home as quickly as possible.

Vollie Day 08: Quiet Mornings

Gosh but I'm loving my very long break from work.  We took my grandfather to New Zealand (he's 93 and he's never before needed a passport) and he stayed with us for a month when we got back.  Since he left I'm finding myself with a lot more time on my hands, and so I can do a lot more volunteering.  I'm loving Communities @ Work, where I've helped a little on the "Mini Michelangelos" program (adorable kids being taught how to put some adorable paintings together all on their own), the "Singalong" program (adorable older folks chillaxing to folk music and occasionally singing along to it), the "Care and Share" program (the Yellow Van picks up great-but-retired food from shops all over town and gives it to people who are having trouble putting the money together for food right now)... Also Lifeline run a little food outlet for fundraising and I've picked up a few shifts there, and another agency is trying to make some isolated seniors more confident in catching the bus and I'll do 'training' for that tomorrow (presumably, we'll get on a bus)... but this is the NAC vollie blog, so here goes:

I might have neglected to log my last vollie day so I'll leave the gap in the numbers here until I remember what happened: clearly, not much.

Yesterday's shift though was quite special.  I opened with a group of one lovely couple who, it turned out, were passing the time at NAC on their way to a medical appointment that they were nervous about.  :(
The vista at the Arboretum turned out to be a great way for them to get through a bad morning.

My second tour was a large group of ten or more (to start with, although I do tend to lose some when we get out on the deck and I start talking about soil types...).  We were having so much fun I came clean to wearing somebody else's name badge, and then somebody said that they were going to write to NAC to thank their great tour guide "Tiffany", whose badge I was wearing because she has probably left town.

My third group were two couples from Perth.  They didn't intend to take a tour until I bullied them into it, but it worked out.  We bonded over our shared bemusement regarding the proposed Opera House: both the design, and the suggestion that there's a market for that much opera in Perth.

A new highlight at NAC is the English Oak tree planted right near the playground by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge last week.  More mundane, but probably more popular: NAC is currently surfacing the car park. Good times, good times....

Vollie Day 06: Heat Stress

Let's not kid ourselves: the heat waves wreck us all.  I did another guiding shift on Saturday - numbers in the Village Centre were down by about two-thirds, and most people who made it through the fearfully hot car-park were content to crash out with a drink for hours.

I posted times for two tours before anybody took interest - not a big deal as long as I have a book, a chair, and a timer on to remind me to go and take the next tour.  During the afternoon I still got to take three tiny tour groups around the centre.  I even got to practise a highly personalised tour with one group of one very polite lady - so polite that I thought that she might be a plant who was just pitying/humouring me.  Bless her heart.

We all observed that a lot of the forests are under stress at the moment, at the peak of summer.

The Buchan Blue looks... well, dead

The heat is getting to every forest and every visitor: at 3:05 pm a very well-dressed older lady asked how on earth she was going to get out to the Margaret Whitlam Pavilion for a 3:00 wedding.  When I pointed to the pavilion, and said that the only way out there is to walk, well, there was drama.

It's a long walk, and she's already had to walk all the way in from the car park, and it's a terrible day, and she has high blood pressure, and it's already started, and we should have a vehicle for times like this...

Ignoring that she and her carpool had arrived late all on their own, an old memory burped its way into the conversation about somebody sometime planning to buy a golf cart to assist guests when needed.  I went to seek it, but it turned out to be a myth.  The shop dude talked them through driving out there and parking in the one disabled bay that is reserved out at the pavilion, and they got to it.

Hot days do at least make sense of the cactus patch

I broke spells outside (in the shade, even) with some spells under the air-conditioning outlet and getting some photos of the forests in the heat.

The Camden White Gum has had better summers

Still a great afternoon!

A morning walk in the sun

Cool forest on a hot day

Meetup.com has so vitally enriched my life.  One great local group is Walking, Cycling, Trips and More. Bob, who runs the show, has an incredible repertoire of walks to take people on, and I always love where he gets us to meetup.

Today he got 20 of us together in NAC, and I took the opportunity to practice my speech outside.  I wasn't on duty, but I got to lead everybody out of the Village Centre (yes, we left the building!), over to STEP, up to the Himalayan Cedars, and all the way down to the Cork Oak.

It was a grand day to be taking out so many people who were visiting NAC for the first time - after a week over 40C the morning didn't punish us too terribly, and we made it back for an ice-cream in the late morning with no stroke victims or anything.

Vollie Day 05: Tours around the Village Centre

Today was my second guiding shift.  Of course I overslept and missed my start by enough time for the other dude on duty to take the first group out on his own.  I was punished with visitor count duty until my turn came up, which was a good chance to practice whatever I thought I might say.  

My first group was a friendly little quartet: two lovely young ladies visiting from Brisbane and Sweden (FYI I asked if they had trees in Sweden, and she said yes they do), and a polite local couple, all of whom were visiting NAC for the first time, so I kicked things off with a warning that I'll probably just make everything up and my fellow guide, who I'd asked to follow me around and give me some feedback, would sort things out. 

He showed me right up on the next tour - we took about twenty people around and I was impressed with how exactly the same material sounds completely different when being presented by somebody else.  He is enthusiastic, knowledgeable and knows how to control a crowd.  

Somewhere in this frame is where I left my dignity

Fortunately for me, a NAC crowd is a very forgiving audience. I left him at his last stop early to go and pick up my second group, but I didn't get any takers.  I set a start time for the next tour, coffeed, tried to befriend the magpies, and went back to the meeting point to discover a 25-person tour group all to myself.  I took a deep breath and plunged in. 

So here's my new formula (warning: contains spoilers)

• A potted history of NAC at the starting point, and a little about the architectural features of the Village Centre building. 
• A short trip to the interactive map near the meeting point gives more people time to catch up with us if they decide to join us late, and a chance to demonstrate that there are parts of NAC that we can't see from the Village Centre (most of it).  It's also a good place to start talking about fire planning.
• Out on the north deck, I can supplement some information about the conservation and research value of NAC with some general highlights like the two mature forests, the events terrace, the Wide Brown Land Sculpture, the ceremonial plantings, STEP and the Pod Playground (today I learned to do so either in that order or the reverse order so that I am keeping their eyes and bodies moving in only one direction).  If nobody's eyes are glazing over I talk about soil and more about fire prevention.  
• The south deck is a great place to talk about water, because the 37Ml dam is right below, and it's possible to point at the massive earthworks and reveal that there are some nice big tanks underneath them.  The amphitheatre and the Margaret Whitlam Pavilion are unmissable features, and I do my best to encourage people to get up to the top of Dairy Farmers Hill to see the best view in NAC.  Some people want to know about a couple of success stories we've already had.  Everybody is interested in either the ACTEW AGL Canberra Discovery Garden because they're local and it's good to know what works in a Canberra garden, or the Bonsai collection because, well, they like trees.  If I'm lucky, the local magpie family sings me all the way through the south deck speech. 

New things I learned today:

• That NAC is funded by ACT Government - it's a local project, not a federal project. 
• Yeah I need to learn about the Buchan Blue, STEP, and the Camden White Gum.