Tapp's Travels

I did say I wasn’t going to use the B word again.  However, it’s April Fools Day (that shows you how busy we’ve been!) and Nick and Cath have just sent a couple of relevant photos which I reproduce here…

And the new commemorative coin …

Now, in the last couple of weeks of our stay on the Sunshine Coast, we need to catch up with friends and relations.

Peter and Beryl took us and a couple of their friends for a Tibetan supper at a restaurant inside the camp ground at Forest Glen – Jampa’s Spirit of Tibet.  Now our connection with the Beinnsens is more than a little interesting.  Well, I think so anyway.  It’s a long story, but in essence it involves three of my marine biology college-day friends.  Two of whom are serious Australiophiles – their travels in this magnificent country make us look like beginners!  I think they’ve travelled “Down-under” at least 7,500 times.  OK, well lots anyway.  The third connection has lived and worked in Townsville for many years and – coincidentally – is well known to Penny from the Myanmar cruise.

In all our (now 24 visits) we have never been in the same area as David and Penny (and there are too many Pennys in this episode) at the same time.  Then on one occasion, nine or ten years ago, we discovered we were all going to be in Queensland at the same time.  “Where are you going to be?”  “Mooloolaba!”  “Really, so are we!”  It turns out they were visiting the friends they made when buying their camping truck (now known affectionately as “Wombat”).  And they were the Peter and Beryl of this story.

It transpired that P & B live about 200 m from Robin’s old house as the lorikeet flies.  400 m by boat and about 3 kms by road.  In conversation, the plot further deepened when we discovered that in a previous life in Townsville they had succeeded (or was it preceeded) the third Newcastle University friend, David Barnes, in a job!  Small world!

Kevin and Robyn (friends from Brisbane we met on the Kimberley trip) spent a wet day with us – perfect for a catch up.

… and an evening meal at Pelican Waters pub with Lorraine, another of their friends.  So that was five senior specials!

Then Penny, a long-standing friend (made by Glenda when I had to dash home when my mother got very ill) came for morning tea.  Penny’s outlook on life is… well let’s just say unconventional.  Delightfully unconventional.  “As it flows” best describes her view of long-range planning …  And in that context 24 hours can be a distant horizon!  But she did bring an apple turn-over, a loaf of banana bread and a jar of homemade strawberry jam!  Cup of tea next Tuesday, Penny?

Today we met Steve and Marie for morning tea at the Silva Spoon Cafe in Cotton Tree.  This place had been voted the best tea shop in Queensland for the last three years in a row.  We were introduced to it three years ago by Penny-as-it-flows-Clarke.  The place was jammed – largely by a party of ladies of a certain age who seemed to be trying to out-do one another with high pitched cackles of laughter.

But the tea was good and it is always great to catch up with the Ricketts.  (We met them almost exactly ten years ago at a pub – the Iluka Tavern??? – in Freycinet, Tasmania.)  They’ve been trying to shake us off for a decade now!  Clearly regretting letting us share their sunset table all those years ago!  We had a three mile walk along the Maroochy River…

… and then branching off into the newly extended (last week) shopping Plaza.  Afterwards, another seniors lunch at the Marochydore Surf Lifesaving Club.  Sadly not quite as special as the one at Pelican Waters.

Beryl and John from Stanthorpe (Beryl is Glenda’s first cousin, three times removed) came to stay for a couple of nights.  We had a lovely lunch at Secrets on the Lake one day.

Which has a lot of amazing wood carvings by an artist called Jack Wilms (who we met a number of years ago at his studio in the middle of the woods in the Obi Obi valley).

We had a walk to the edge of the Baroon Pocket Dam below the restaurant and investigated the dam wall and spillway.

The dam was full to capacity – unlike it was on our previous visit a few years ago when it was half empty.  That’s dams in Australia for you!  Later we took tea at the elegant Spicers Clovelly resort…

We stopped for a (different) view of the Glasshouse Mountains …

We called in at Art on Cairncross to say goodbye to Jane and Tony to discover that Jane was very seriously ill and in intensive care.  We had only seen her a few days previously – big shock.  So off to the Sunshine University Hospital to deliver a card.  Very sensibly they wouldn’t let me on the ward even though I said I was Jane’s long lost cousin from the UK.  But the hospital is truly magnificent.  It’s been built very recently to cater for the massively increased numbers of residents (current and planned).

The internal corridors are so long and numerous that they are all named as roads and avenues!  The multi-story carparks alone are bigger than the whole of Torbay Hospital which serves our part of South Devon!  Let’s hope that they can sort Jane out swiftly …

Just to complete the visitors-catch-up-thing: we still owe Beryl and Peter a breakfast and we are trying to get together with Trish and Trevor.  But as I write this we only have four days left.  Oh no!!!

I don’t know if you have seen this – I think it’s worth a quick view…

If this doesn’t work try Googling “Tokyo Express 20171.mp4”

Sorry, I’m not sure that I have yet mastered how to put active links into the post!