We extended yet another day to attend to the warranty obligations of the landcruiser. Yesterday’s travels were really all about hunting down a trustworthy garage to do the work however I, as navigator and chief tour organiser, managed to incorporate the business goals of the day into a day of exploration and pleasure.
We checked out the Toyota service agents in both
Charlestown and in Maitland, the first much closer to our camp and whose quote
was the highest but included a courtesy car for the day and a half they would
need the vehicle, and the second whose quote was less but who inspired trust and
awarded service and had offered excellent advice to us last year when we had called
to see them. They offered to pay for lunch or the movies while they completed
the extensive work required for the 160,000 kilometre service, but were booked
out until 11th July. After having had such excellent service from
the Repco service agent in Adelaide late last year, we checked out others
working under the same umbrella here; one at Wallsend and the other also at Maitland.
Both quoted far less than the Toyota dealers, in fact at almost half the price.
And so once we had ruled out hanging about until mid-month, we decided to have
the work done in Wallsend and made the appropriate arrangements.
After traveling upriver to Maitland we drove westwards
to Cessnock, passing through relatively flat country covered in open bush occupied
with life-stylers running a few cattle or grazing horses. The famous vineyards
of the Hunter Valley were also in evidence along with signs pointing to out-of-the
way cafes down the odd bush track, tourist accommodation and a few rather smart
lodges. But Cessnock itself is a simple down-to-earth town of 22,000 people
which grew to service the coal miners in the area. Through the 1800s
agriculture, both pastoral and cropping, was carried out in the area, but superseded
by coal mining which became the principal industry and employer during the
first half of the 1900s, however this slumped in the 1960s. Today Cessnock is
the gateway to the vineyards of the Hunter Valley, but the town itself has not
changed with the times and would in itself not draw the particular genre of
tourists that label might suggest. The town’s welcoming “mission statement” is “Mines,
Wines, People”.
We returned to Belmont via Kurri Kurri which also
calls itself the gateway to the Hunter Valley vineyards and yet we saw less of
these here. It too had coal mining as its raison d’etre, but unlike Cessnock,
is more attractive, with a population of only just over 5,500.
We drove on into the bush clad hills to the west of
Newcastle, down to the northern edge of Lake Macquarie and back to camp down
the now familiar but ever attractive eastern shore of the lake.
Today we were up before the birds and on the road
with the city commuters, parked up outside the garage before they opened at 8 am.
Having left the landcruiser in the professionals’ capable hands, we caught the
bus into Newcastle. Chris asked the driver for a return ticket for two into the
city. The driver charged us $5 for two day senior concession multi-passes.
The bus driver, even if blind to my youth, was
wonderfully welcoming to us as visitors to his city. He had us stay on the bus
until we reached the bus terminal and then escorted us out onto the riverside promenade
and pointed out all the wonderful attractions we should spend our day enjoying,
explaining attributes and history of several. What a gem of a man!!!
The temperature was still only 9 degrees and seemed
even less in the biting wind so we decided to head into the built up part of
the city rather than venture along the waterfront to areas we had in fact
already explored without his bidding some days before. We climbed the one
hundred and eighty steps of the Queens Wharf Tower from where we had splendid
views across the city, upriver to the port and up the coast toward Port
Stephens, then found the Hunter Mall which looked like it might be a busy
buzzing interesting place later in the day. We caught the bus along King Street
to discover the extent of the Marketown Shopping Centre which proved to be less
impressive than expected. However we were able to have some printing done,
Chris’s cellphone topped up and my hair cut at Just Cuts.
The young athletic
hairdresser was very sweet but had appalling enunciation, so much so I had to
ask her to repeat her welcoming spiel three times before I registered what she
had said. Perhaps it was my apparent deafness that prompted her, while shearing
my untidy locks, to ask if I had grandchildren and great grandchildren! This
was not my day! Obviously deprived sleep time because of the early morning start
had left a mark on me today.
Disappointed to find that this shopping centre did
not offer a cinema, we decided to return partway to the western suburbs, to the
Jesmond Shopping Centre we had seen from the bus window. We did not find any
cinema here either, however did find a sports park adjacent to the centre and
sat in the warm sun reading the paper and eating our sandwiches. Despite now being
confident senior bus travellers, we decided to walk to Wallsend. This took us a
little over half an hour. We then spent an hour familiarising ourselves with
the commercial area of the town, then with still no call from Frame Mechanical,
we found the library and spent the rest of the afternoon browsing magazines in
the reading room.
As we pulled out in to the traffic just before five,
the parrots were noisily settling in the trees and the sky was superb; a very
full moon hanging over the horizon in a pale pink sky above low pale blue clouds. Dusk soon turned to
traffic jams in the dark and a very slow trip home. There had been an accident
on the road about five kilometres north of camp and we crawled along the route for
half an hour. By the time we passed whatever had occurred, a tow-truck was
loading a rather smashed up car; the rest we can only guess at.
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