Blog #12 Dear Bloggies

 Blog 12

 Dear Bloggies, these blogs continue to stutter along in fits and starts because I don’t get any time free of distractions and, after a couple of days, I’ve lost track of the detail of what happened. Hope it all makes sense!

Lovely Ports

Don’t you love these names?

Tuesday May 14
I forgot to mention in the last blog that, on the way to Albury, we got flagged down by a motorist who said that she’d read all about us in the newspaper - our 15 minutes of fame! - and we spent some time chatting with her by the side of the road before continuing our journey. Albury is a city we often visited when we were living in Myrtleford, but we never really explored the parklands by the Murray. They were a bit of a revelation to us. They were beautiful. Better still, they had a cycleway, which led us almost directly to our next hosts, Rodney and Jozette, from the North Albury Rotary club. We discovered that that this club was very large and supported a number of ‘clubs’ within the club, such as a caravan club and a cycling club. Obviously, for us the cycling club was of interest and we heard that a group of these cyclists had recently been in Launceston on a charity ride to raise money for motor neurone disease. One of main organisers of that cycle event was our daughter’s next door neighbour.

On Wednesday we set off to ride parallel to the Murray River to Rutherglen and our next hosts, Graham and Margaret. Their club is in Corowa, which is just across the river from Rutherglen. Shadowing the Murray, our route was fairly flat and, although it was a main highway, it really wasn’t very busy till we reached Howlong. Here we nearly got wiped out by a four-wheel-drive coming out of a side road and, as we are very visible with flashing lights front and rear, we can only assume he was asleep at the wheel…or on his phone. He clearly I didn’t see us and barely avoided us. That prompted us to pause for a coffee and to regain our composure before crossing the Murray on a series of bridges. The route took us past an endless forest of stately red gums which thrive in the swampy ground either side of the river. Once across the Murray onto the southside we were back in Victoria again and here the traffic was much busier with no road shoulder making that first handful of kilometres very unpleasant. More so when a homicidal motorist passed alarmingly close at high-speed, honking his horn when we were teetering on the white line on the edge of the road. There absolutely was nowhere else for us to go. 

10 km out of Rutherglen, the road forked and all the traffic went straight ahead, whilst we went left along a very quiet and very pleasant road. Halfway along this, I became aware of somebody talking to Joyce. It was an ambulanceman hanging out of the passenger window of his ambulance and casually chatting to Joyce whilst his driver casually drove along the wrong side of the road. He told us he was hard-core cyclist and we had a long conversation, at least five minutes, with him blocking the oncoming lane and offering advice on safe and not so safe cycling routes in the area. The ambulance they were driving was marked as an emergency ambulance and we can only assume that nobody was breathing their last in the back.

Our hosts, Graham and Margaret were well known to us through both cycling and through Rotary. Graham had been a member of the Murray to Mountains Rail Trail committee that I was on five or so years previously and had done a number of charity rides. We spent a pleasant afternoon chatting with them after a brief visit to the visitor centre in Rutherglen, which is probably the Australian centre for fortified wine production. Port and muscat produced from the local vineyards in Rutherglen are renowned and the town is considered to be the starting point for the Murray to mountains Tail Trail, which ran through Myrtleford. 

Graham is about five years older than us and has done many cycle tours in Europe, usually solo, so it was surprising to hear that his wife, Margaret, could tell us in great detail about the routes that he taken, all the places he stayed at, and even the people he had met, because she wasn’t accompanying him.  It appeared that she wrote up his blogs and curated his photographs after the trips.

Old sign in the Howlong cafe

Joyce wearing Jenny’s optics

Earnest discussion on the Australian Constitution. Fuelled by a packet of chocolate biscuits

Thursday May 16
After much discussion with Graham about a suitable,6 safe cycling route, we accepted his offer to go in the back of his Ute along the dangerous section of highway to Howlong and then follow a route which he recommended towards Holbrook. The day was perfect. Sunny, fairly warm and absolutely still. In the first 35 minutes of cycling along a excellent road we saw not a single vehicle and so we made rapid progress, passing through such evocatively named places as a Burrumbuttock and Walla Walla on our way to coffee at the cafe at Culcairn, a place that we had often passed through on our way to Wagga. Finally, arriving in Holbrook mid afternoon to be greeted by our hosts, Milt and Jenny who were sat in the warm sun on the front verandah.

Holbrook is a popular stopping place on the Hume highway, now bypassed, and probably busier than ever. It’s major attraction (apart from coffee) is an old submarine ‘beached’ in a park in the centre of the town. The HMAS Otway was decommissioned in 1995 and it’s ‘skin’ relocated in Holbrook in honour of a submariner from Holbrook who won the VC. It’s final resting place is about 300km from the sea.

Our hosts were a fascinating couple. Jenny was born locally  but spent most of her adult life in America with her American husband Milt, and they both decamped from America immediately following 911, looking for a safer country. Milt, having been an investment banker in USA, found it difficult to get an appropriate job in Australia but was obviously very talented individual. His wife, Jenny, was a cheerful, upbeat lady who had two very serious medical issues. She was totally deaf and reliant on bilateral cochlear implants and with these in place her deafness was not apparent. She was also registered blind due to a rare, congenital eye disease and had an optical device on the front of her glasses, which allowed her to see a very small cone in front of her relatively clearly. During our stay with them we learnt an awful lot about both deafness and blindness. Who knew that, with cochlear implants removed at bedtime, it is impossible to hear the smoke alarm without a special device under the pillow, which trembles violently when the alarm sounds. 

Our Rotary meeting was an absolute pleasure. It was held in a Chinese restaurant initially, and then many of the Rotarians decamped to Milt and Jenny‘s house where they rigged up the audio visual, and we have our PowerPoint presentation.

On Friday we cycled to Wagga ( that is Wagga Wagga but, like most place names in Oz it gets contracted to Wagga) again excellent sunny warm conditions and we paused briefly at a tiny settlement called Mangoplah (pop. 309) which had a post office/general store and outside this were two seats and a table where two elderly ladies were scoffing chocolate biscuits and loudly discussing the Australian constitution. It was pure Monty Python. 
Arriving in Wagga, we looked for our Airbnb, which was called the Loft. Unfortunately, the GPS directed us to a nightclub called the Loft and we spent a fruitless 20 minutes, walking up and down the main street trying to find this address before tumbling to the problem. The correct address was within walking distance and the Airbnb was, exactly as it said on the tin, in a loft.  It looked fairly industrial on the inside but it had everything that we needed. It was warm, there was access to a washing machine and it was very central to the remainder of Wagga so we were able to give the bike a rest and walk everywhere over the weekend. 

The only thing we had actually planned for the weekend, other than wandering about and looking at the banks of the Murrumbidgee as they run through the Parkland, was a visit to a restaurant that we had enjoyed 10 years before when I did a locum in Wagga. On Saturday night we booked a table at the Magpie’s Nest restaurant, which lies about 5 km out of the town, and it did not disappoint. It was excellent.

The Murrumbidgee here in Wagga has a beach, a lovely sandy beach, on one of the tight bends in the river where it meanders through parkland flanked by a high levee. Flooding is not uncommon and can be disastrous - during one of my visits to Wagga I listened to a theatre nurse describing how she had managed to rescue over 20 of her horses from drowning. An absolutely huge undertaking to get so many horses into horse floats and away to safety.

As I said, our loft was rather industrial. It still had a hoist sticking out through one of the gables, which had doors, rather than windows, in it. The doors were ill fitting and would have been draughty had there not been excellent heating. The gables and pitched ceilings meant odd angles putting us in danger of banging our heads getting up off the loo or out of bed in the night. The loft is situated above a garage at the back of a suburban house and accessed through the garden, which was patrolled by three poodles of widely different sizes, all with loud barks. They never seem to recognise us and always greeted us with frenzied dashing about and barking when we passed through the garden.

Our only other task in Wagga was to visit a bank because we have a few issues arising with our credit card. Our main credit card expires on the last day of May and we don’t get home until 1 June. We recognised a possible problem and brought a backup credit card but neither of us have been able to remember the PIN number. It’s three strikes and you’re out with PIN numbers unless you wait a couple of days, consequently we have tried on three separate occasions to get money out of an ATM and then abandoned it before it gobbled the card. After much discussion we came up with the correct PIN and heaved a sigh of relief. 

On Monday, May 20 we rode the 40 km to Coolamon, using bike tracks to exit Wagga and then, because there was no alternative, taking a major road, which was busy and had no shoulder. We were surprised to find when we arrived in Coolamon that one of the major fundraising events of their Rotary club was assisting in a mass participation bike ride from Wagga to Coolamon along this very road. It seemed to us a very dangerous undertaking unless they stop the traffic. 

Can’t fault the generosity of Oz farmers - sending top soil to NZ

We were hosted by John and Roslyn, who lived in a brand new house in the centre of the small town and next door to a smaller house of similar vintage and style. It turned out that John was a retired farmer who had sold his farm and built two houses side-by-side. One to live in and one to use as a function centre and a radio museum. In his earlier life, John had been an electronic engineer had been involved in launching and tracking rockets from Woomera. I’m not sure whether he ever signed the official secrets act, but he told us some fascinating information about infrared tracking of rockets throughout the world.

Life’s a beach, even 350km inland

John had been a farmer’s son, so farming was in his blood, and he had worked his own farm near Coolemon until recently and, whilst there, had collected many, many old radios, which he was in the process of restoring and displaying in his second house. As if this wasn’t enough, he had taught at the local TAFE and had, five years previously, taken up the cello, which he now played in an orchestra in Wagga. A truly multi, talented man. 
Roslyn was equally talented in the area of needlework and embroidery, and had her own large needlework room in the house, just as John had his music room.

The Rotary meeting in Coolemon was one of the most lively that we’ve attended with everybody very clearly great friends, to the extent that they decided the evening meeting wasn’t enough and they gathered again the following morning in the Coolemon Cheese Factory, which doubles as a cafe, to send us off.

One of their members, Alex, had previously worked in the cheese factory and gave us a personalised tour, followed by a tasting of some very impressive cheeses. The Brie was a standout.

All in all, we were very impressed with Cooleman.