The ruckus took place on Friday night when the whole town turned up at the showgrounds to try their luck on the wheel, hoping to win a ham for Christmas, consoling themselves with a snowfreeze from the little van or a burger from the barbeque, all on site, or a bounce in the Cactus Saloon, before Santa arrived after dark. And while the punters were busy doing all this, a chap with a guitar attempted to lull some calm into the precedings. His talent, or lack of, reminded me why I did not always like Country Music; in the arms of such a crooner there is a whining and wailing of the sameness, over and over. This one would never have been invited to play at the Mildura Music Festival. None of this bothered us because we had our television on and the party finished up fairly early. Here children are taken home to bed at a reasonable hour.
We were away from Lowood early, after we had walked up to the newsagency for the weekend newspaper, leaving the CMCA revellers to the place without foreign interlopers such as ourselves.
We drove south down the Lowood-Minden Road, a distance of only eleven kilometres to the Darren Lockley Highway but pulled over just before reaching the main road at the rest area we had picnicked over three years ago. Today the cattle egrets were there again in their multitudes, glorious in their apricot plumage, the boughs of the trees heavy with their weight. I suspect the folk at Minden are not as delighted by their presence as I was to see them; the trees of three years ago are still recovering from the roosting burden of the past.
We were set up at the showgrounds here in Ipswich by mid-morning and spent the rest of the day much like the previous, and those that will stretch out before us until a decision must be made or someone else’s money is safely in our coffers.
Christmas always brings a glut of festivity, stretching from the beginning of December right through to when school goes back toward the end of January, and Ipswich is no different to any other. Last night a big organised party was held in the conference centre within the showgrounds and went on at least until I fell asleep near midnight. Earlier in the evening, after catching up for a good long chat on Skype with Larissa, we had been treated to a fireworks display in the opposite direction, great bursts of noise and colour that went on and on until one started only to think of the waste of money rather than the delight of the spectacle.
I did say I would not mention “early” again, but really I must. I was woken at about 5.30 am by a bustle of activity close to the caravan; people were arriving to claim the freshest of the fruit and vegetables available at the Sunday market a hundred metres or so from us, here in the showgrounds. Chris soon informed me that the setup of stalls had commenced around 3 am, so I was thankful I had managed a further two and a half hours before being woken.
We started our day at about 6.30am, wandering over to the market half an hour after the official opening time, armed with an empty “green” bag which came home just as empty. There were about half a dozen fresh produce stalls, none with prices much better than the supermarkets, stalls with caged birds, pot plants, laying chooks, a couple of vans selling coffee, another selling cakes but the rest were selling a muddle of junk. There is nothing classy about the Ipswich Sunday Market, a fact that would normally make it all the more appealing to us than the more upmarket ones, however we are in pack-up mode and the last thing we need to be doing is buying more “stuff”. Had we wandered about here a year ago, we probably would have returned with a few more books, DVDs, a tool or two, a plate, but today there was nothing we needed, because we need nothing at all. With our curiosity satisfied, we sat over our regular breakfast watching the market customers arrive in their hundreds, many parking here in the camping area. We made sure our For Sale signs were on the windows however no one came knocking on the door.
We delayed lunch, waiting for a couple to turn up from the Gold Coast to view the caravan, and spent the intervening time watching many hundreds of benign bikies in the Annual Toy Run. Earlier media reports suggested there might be as many as eight hundred registering for the police escorted parade; I suspect there were more; the stream of noisy motors seemed endless. No sooner had I made sandwiches, did our visitors arrive and after an hour and a half, left to consider their options.
The other couple expected to come through from east Brisbane did not turn up, so instead the afternoon passed in reading and watching the fourth day of the second Ashes test match. With no immediate sale on the table, we decided it was time to change tack, however in these matters there is no perfect method. It is all a matter of luck, matching buyer with seller at the right moment.
Alas, as I reread this, I fear I sound like a curmudgeon; bah-humbug.
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