Return to Oz

I type these lines in Gloucester, New South Wales, a small cattle and dairy community where our friends are hosting us for the next couple of weeks. We arrived last Friday in Sydney and spent that day trying to get our biological clocks reset at a hotel near the Central train station and visiting a few places that we remembered from earlier trips. The flight across the globe was rather easy this time, primarily because Jayne and I both flew first class and were able to lie down in a narrow bed for as long as we wished. The food was not particularly to my liking, but I appreciated the bottomless champagne glass.

The train to Gloucester from Sydney station was four hours long, but quite pleasant, allowing us to relax in the first class coach while watching the countryside roll by. It takes a long time to get out of the heavily urbanized Sydney area, but once that is accomplished the forests, meadows, and farms pass in an enless series of green foliage. Once we got to Gloucester, our friends, Ronald and Jane, met us at the staion and whisked us away to their country estate just outside of town.

Their home is beautiful, with a wrap around porch, four bedrooms, two living rooms, and a swimming pool and spa. The home is simply beautiful, with space every where you look. The day after our arrival, we were taken to a craft fair held on the grounds of the local park. Much like such affairs in the states. there were shade structures erected over merchants offering a variety of goods from hemp clothing to macrame pot holders. The weather was beautiful, slightly overcast with temperatures in the sixties, I estimate. Not bad for the middle of winter.

Today we will drive a few miles outside of town to visit and tour an abandoned gold mine. Apparently there was quite a strike here in the early years and all that remains of the mining camp called Copeland is the operating infastructure of a large mine. The forest has reclaimed all the land taken up for stores, houses, and pubs that were hastily erected here in 1876.