Nimbin

Just to fill you in on the Nimbin visit. We spoke to someone who had been to Nimbin in 1976, same year as hubby visited and this guy decided to come back and live there. He now has a organic grocery store.

It is not a very big place but tourists still flock to it and we could see tourists from many different countries.  I guess it is due to the fact that it seems like any other little country town, with a post office and police station and a school, nothing  shocking really but it still has this little "forbidden" air to it. It's a step back in time and very laid back, maybe for obvious reasons.

Here is the big joint that I promised last time I wrote. This is hanging in the Hemp Embassy and you can buy all sorts of other paraphernalia there related to marijuana. For example a hemp coffin, which is much cheaper than ordinary coffins and biodegradable. You can also buy hemp undies and hats etc, all byproducts of the hemp.

As you can see the work ethics are pretty relaxed

We also drove up to the rainforest (in the rain) and it is very beautiful. Unfortunately it rained pretty heavily when  we were up there so no photos I am afraid.

The next day we went to Byron Bay, which was really nice. We also visited the national park with the most eastern point in Australia.

Then we had a swim in this beautiful bay with clean, clear water and gentle waves, heaven!!!

Big things

Well, I have now seen four big things to add to my list. First was the Big Axe. It was in an area where they had had a lot of timber cutting in the old days.

 Then we saw the Big Banana in Coffs Harbor, which was the first "Big thing" ever constructed. Hubby had a little brain freeze there since he wanted to have a chocolate covered banana and didn't realize they were frozen. He thought it was a normal banana with chocolate and nuts on it, hehe!!

 We also saw the big Prawn here in Ballina where we have been staying for a few days. The poor thing looked pretty sick and a lady I talked to said that it looked nothing compared to what she remembered from when she was young. Then it was pinky orange and there were coffe shops and playgrounds around it. Now it was quite sad really. Let's hope they do something in the future!
The final one was on the way home driving through Tamworth where we saw the Big Golden Guitar, since it is the Australian hometown of country music and they have a festival there every year.

We have also been to Nimbin the marijuana capital of this fine nation and that was great fun but I'll have to get the photos from hubby.  There was a hemp embassy and other interesting things.  Here is one to keep you going.
Oh, there was one big thing there as well. The big spliff but you have to stand by to see that, since it is on hubby's camera.

It's time to have a little sleep and wake up and go to Tamworth tomorrow. And then home since sister in law and brother in law are arriving, and we don't want to miss that.

...on the road again...

Ok, almost ready to set off, just waiting for hubby as usual doing his last minute fiddling and organizing. He really works after the old slogan "No press, no production". He seems to be more effective in the 15 minutes before we finally leave than the whole weekend before hand. I am used to it now but there were times when ... let's not  say to much here but ....our national traits were very obvious. With Germanic dislike for tardiness I would fret like mad about being late  while hubby with his usual fluid notion of time would go about his business. Then we would finally leave twenty minutes late, but assured that the doors and windows were locked and nothing electrical was left on etc.
But planes and ferries and trains wait for no one, or do they?

When we were due to get married and I was still in Sweden, hubby was supposed to come over from Edinburgh via Newcastle then by ferry to Sweden for the wedding.  He got to the station not-so-bright, but very early to find that the trains were cancelled due to a tunnel cave-in, and was sent off to the bus station.  There was a bus, but it would not arrive in Newcastle until around noon, for a 12:30 ferry departure.  He took it anyway, fretted half an hour away at the intermediate stop in Peebles unsuccessfully willing the driver to get going again, and arrived at Newcastle exactly at noon.  He jumped into a taxi, and asked the driver to step on it, to be told something like 'More than my job's worth, guv' in Geordie equivalent.  True to form he arrived at the North Sheild's ferry port just on 12:30, and ran into the ferry terminal prepared for the worst.  The ferry staff were very kind when they heard he was getting married though, and the ticket agent ran alongside him checking his ticket and passport while another called ahead to lower the gang-way again.  He made it, and here we are still together, almost on time, 33 years later.

Hi again

Now we are in Coffs Harbour after having driven through a mild drizzly rain almost the whole time. There were a few highlights and I hope the photos came out ok.  They might not since it has been a very grey day.
For example we tried to get to The pub with no beer  but we never found it and had we found it  we would not been able to have a beer, so it was really a double negative. No actually we googled it when we got back to the hotel and it seems to have all that is necessary for a pub and it was made famous by this folksong.

White Christmas.....not....

Hubby had a little end-of-the-year party for work with a dinner cruise on the Port Hacking river Friday night. I really didn't want to go at first. The combination of dining and being on the river on a boat that you couldn't get off,  was very unappealing. I agreed to go eventually, but I had taken my precautions. I had cash, and if it looked like it was going to be windy when we set off, I would just go to the Yacht Club and party with whoever was there and meet up with hubby afterwards. As it happened it was dead calm and great, very beautiful in fact and not at all windy. I was in great company at my table and made new friends.

So tomorrow it is going to be Christmas with no snow, but there will be white wine.... and a barbecue either on the beach or on the terrace, and then we are off on another trip. I'll tell you more about it later on.

I have been a bit slack in writing lately but it has been mainly because of the horrible shootings in the US, and other horrible things happening. There are still so many people out there, mainly in the US, who are very positive to the right of every citizen to carry guns. Some even say that teachers should be allowed to have guns.  When I play Scrabble on line, mainly with US players, I can follow the discussions going on, and many people would never give up their right to own a gun to "protect" their families. So what about the over 30,000 people who die from gunshot wounds in the US  every year! Something has to change!

Have you seen the little cute Oreo cookies that seem to tell us that it is ok, it is not the end of the world,  keep dunking!!!

I'm on a roll here

Yes, I have to write it down before I forget the details. That's the problem with aging isn't it, things and happenings run into one another so I strongly recommend blogging or other forms of keeping track and it's fun too. I remember my father-in-law, when he visited us in France and we went on some trips together, he always noted down places and things they'd seen at the end of the day. I am ashamed to say that there were a few times when we got a little impatient with this, since we wanted to do other things, but now having reached the age that he was then, I fully understand him doing this. You know when you've been on holidays and you look at your photos and can't remember where or when something was taken, well he wrote down where he took photos, which was lucky because he took many photos of churches and after a while they all start looking the same.

Anyhow, when I went up to the Barossa Valley this man in the tourist office told me to go and see the Whispering Wall which was supposed to be well worth it. It was a little bit out of the way but I went anyway. What it is is a dam, and the material of the wall makes sound travel very far. So when you stand at one end, you hear perfectly well another person whispering even at the other end, a hundred meters away. Very weird!

Driving home yesterday hubby became my hero for the day. He spotted a small herd of about 30 sheep that had escaped out on the road, and there was even one who was down with his/her foot caught in the barb-wire fence. When hubby approached, the poor sheep got so panicky that he/she managed to get lose by him/herself. But hubby had been ready to get in there and lift him/her down had it been necessary and that was very brave in my book. You see, they are bigger than you think when you come close up to them.  Those who know me, know that I have a healthy respect, read fear, of animals. We were very low on petrol at this point but decided that we had to drive to a farm and notify someone. So we drove into the first one we saw and told a young girl there. She said that it sounded like it was their sheep but she wasn't too surprised so it probably happens quite often. So all was well and we made it to the next town to fill up on petrol.


When I say town, it can be a small place with a population of 60 and you almost miss it driving through. The petrol station can be a pump in someone's front yard. It's pretty empty out there.

Miles and miles of emptiness or wheat fields. Fortunately we had something to visit now and again, and this time it was the Big Olive.

Almost home

We are driving back from Adelaide and having a last night staying in Hay at the Bidgee Motor Inn. In fact we are just back from the local pub and a gianormous meal. No one told us that a dish for one person here could actually feed four road-train drivers. Hubby can never leave food and has been know to eat up everything uneaten on the kids' plates in the past,  but this time he had to cede to defeat and leave half of his portion. I had given up ages ago,  I guess we are not farmworkers needing our 8.000 calories per meal like the rest of the clients in the pub.

Anyhow we have had a great time on this trip, and I really like Adelaide.  Before we left Sydney some people poo-pooed it for various reasons, but I really like it. It was small enough to find your way around and big enough to have a lot going on.

I have been to museums and to the Barossa Valley and also to a very German town called Hahndorf. I have also been to the art museum and the opal museum and some other ones as well. Here is one of the pieces of art that was chosen as a favorite in the art gallery, when the public was asked to pick the ones they wanted to be exposed. I think it symbolized early motherhood!

In Hahndorf it was all very German and the reason was that many Germans settled there when they came from Europe in the early 1800 due to religious persecution back home. The restaurants and the pubs are filled with German food. I had a bratwurst und kartoffel salat,  yum, sehr gut!!

I have much more to tell but it is bed time so let me leave you with this little saying that I saw in one of the wineries that I visited, and where, by the way, they sold chocolate wine.

Fruit Galore

We are such idiots! We really should know better by now!  I am referring to the fact that every time before we travel I look around the kitchen and decide to pack up all the left-over fruit that we could snack on on the trip. Usually it gets packed away in the back of the car so we can't reach it and it doesn't get eaten. So what happens then is you get to the border to another state, in this case Victoria,  and you see this sign.

So "waste not, want not" and all that, we set about eating the two bananas, four tomatoes, punnet of strawberries, but had to finally throw the cherries away. This incident happened in a small place called Galore hence the title of this blog.

Now you think we should have gotten the message by now, but no, the next day driving through beautiful citrus-fruit orchards near Mildura and also seeing THE BIG ORANGE, we got tempted into buying a large bag of oranges. And yet again another state border to cross, this time into South Australia. So just before entering we had to stop and gorge ourselves on oranges. We even lured some Swiss tourists into having two each as well. It was very lucky we did because at the border our car was searched for fruit so they clearly take this very seriously.

I met these two cute girls sitting on the river bank of the Murray in Mildura. I had just read that a young boy had been eaten by a crocodile somewhere in Australia, and I innocently asked the girls if there were crocodiles in this river. They giggled upproariously and shook their heads, no. I guess it was a stupid question, especially since later I saw groups of families swimming in the river. I still worry about the sharks and the spiders and the snakes and the crocodiles and the jellyfish, I can't help it.