Esoteric Information

I spent most of yesterday wandering around this funny little town. The place has the typical sidewalk bistros and cafes, intermingled with tarot card readers and incense shops. Byron is filled with all manner of countercultural types, and dreadlocks are sported on many a resident. I found the Woolies right away, and scouted two of the best local pie shops, of course. The beach is gorgeous, with nary a high rise building in site which is a pleasant change from the mess I went though yesterday. I saw the cape with the lighthouse where I will hike tomorrow in the distance, and there was a guy hang gliding over the scene like a giant bird. I returned to my lodgings to eat one of my pies in the evening and watched a little TV with some of the kids here. Amazingly, the Olympics were NOT on, and instead they were watching a pretty funny episode of Family Guy featuring the voice of Rush Limbaugh which, watching from an Australian perspective, was hysterical. It got dark pretty early, so when I caught the bus back into town to see how Byron does in the evening it was night. I immediately went to the Friendly Railway Tavern where, to my delight, they had scheduled a Trivia Night. My intention was just to observe, but a couple who observed my glasses and advanced age decided I might be of some use to their team and asked me to join them. They were delightful, and were also joined by another couple who treated me as if they had known me all my life. The theme of the first two rounds of questions was mostly literary, but I could only help on two questions since a lot of the challenges involved Aussie authors. The first was a true or false; Byron Bay is named after the poet. I knew that one and insisted it was not. We got that one correct, but the next one was a historical question that threw all of my teammates into a tailspin. "What other important event happened on Australia Day aside from the raising of the flag at Botany Bay in 1788?" I knew this one and told my mates it was the Rum Rebellion, wherein Governor William Bligh was forcibly deposed by the rebellious New South Wales corps. The couples looked at me as if I was daft, a strange mixture of disbelief and desperate hope that I could be right. As it turned out, we were one of the only teams to get that question right, and I owe it all to my obsessive reading of the early history of this beautiful, fantastic country.