We have stayed in two different types of accommodation in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia, as a timeshare owner who can trade their week for a week anywhere in the world.
Both are resorts, but different sorts of resorts. The first was a typical RCI resort, where everything is laid back and relaxing, with all the amenities one can expect from a resort.
The other, this one, the Wyndham in Coffs Harbour, is very different, and you notice it when you walk in the front door. You are virtually assaulted by hard-nosed timeshare sales staff who really don’t take no for an answer, and then when you finally escape, ring you every day to make an appointment.
I left the phone off the hook.
Aside from that, the place is excellent, the accommodation very good, and the situation one of the best with what could be called a private beach. There are also a number of bushwalks that cater to old people like me.
As you can see, lakes and greenery, and even a putting green.
And in places, they try very hard to hide the ugly multi-story buildings in amongst the trees
It is only a short walk to the ‘private beach’ and it is sufficiently long enough for a morning walk before breakfast. You could even try to catch some fish for breakfast, though I’m not sure if anyone actually caught anything
Or you can just stare out to sea
And, back in the room, this is the view we had from our verandah
I have a passion for visiting transport museums, to see old trains, planes, buses, cars, even ships if it’s possible.
This has led to taking a number of voyages on the TSS Earnslaw in Queenstown, New Zealand.
Many, many, many years ago on Puffing Billy, a steam train in the Dandenongs, Victoria, Australia.
The steam train in Kingston, New Zealand, before it was closed down, but hopefully it will reopen sometime in the future.
The London Transport Museum in London England, which had a lot of buses.
The Workshops Railway Museum in Ipswich, Queensland, where once the many steam engines were built and maintained, and now had only a handful of engines remaining.
However, in the quest for finding and experiencing old transportation methods, we came across the Mary Valley Rattler, which runs out of Gympie, Queensland, Australia.
The ride begins in Gympie at the old Gympie Railway station, and as can be seen below, is one of the relics of the past, and, nothing like the new more modern stations. Thankfully.
If you’re going to have a vintage train, then you have to have a vintage station.
The Class of engine, seen below, is the C17, a superheated upgrade to the C16 it was based on, and first run in 1903. This particular engine was built in 1951, although the first of its type was seen in 1920 and the last of 227 made in 1953. It was the most popular of the steam engines used by Queensland Railways.
The C designation meant it had four driving axels and 17 was the diameter of the cylinder, 17 inches. It is also known as a 4-8-0 steam locomotive and nicknamed one of the “Brown Bombers” because of its livery, brown with green and red trimming.
Also, this engine was built in Maryborough, not far from Gympie by Walkers Limited, one of 138.
This photo was taken as the train returned from Amamoor, a trip that takes up to an hour.
The locomotive is detached from the carriages, then driven to the huge turntable to turn around for the return journey to Amamoor.
This is the locomotive heading down to the water station, and then taking on water. After that, it will switch lines, and reverse back to reconnect the carriages for the trip to Amamoor.
The carriages are completely restored and are extremely comfortable. It brings back, for me, many memories of riding in older trains in Melbourne when I was a child.
The trains, then, were called Red Rattlers.
This is the locomotive climbing one of the hilly parts of the line before crossing over the Mary River on a trestle bridge.
This is the engine at Amamoor near the picnic area where young children and excited parents and grandparents can get on the locomotive itself and look inside where the driver sits.
And, no, I didn’t volunteer to shovel coal.
This particular locomotive spent most of its working life between Townsville and Mount Isa and was based in Cloncurry, Charters Towers, and Townsville, before being sent, at the end of its useful days in the late 1960s, to the Ipswich Railway Workshops.
I’d been on the starship for almost three hours when…
…
The captain was coming up from the earth station by transport, not wanting to trust the transporters, and I’d just finished the orientation of the ship by the second officer, and had arrived on the bridge to see various crew members hunched over their consoles.
The captain had told me, before stepping onto the transport, that we would be leaving the dock shortly after he arrived.
Nothing I’d seen so far had led me to believe it would be going anywhere, anytime soon.
Nevertheless, the crew briefing had run smoothly, the second officer assigned to correlate the complaints/problems list, and everyone else had taken their assigned positions.
I was waiting for the captain, standing beside the ‘chair’, ready to hand over. In any other situation, we would be off to an illustrious start.
Until the dulcet tones of the Chief Engineer rang through the bridge, uttering those fateful words, “the warp coil has had a catastrophic failure”.
This was at odds with another statement he had made earlier when I was in Engineering, and given I was told the Chief Engineer was prone to hyperbole; his statement ‘they just don’t make warp coils like they used to’ hadn’t exactly filled me with confidence, but I had been expecting we would be ready to depart.
I had been looking at the screen, an overlay of the window that looked out over space, or at this moment, the space dock, where there was a representation of the planets that were ‘out there’.
I had been curious about M75, but the helmsman, a rather taciturn chap who seemed to resent the fact he was assigned to this ship, just shrugged and said, “it’s something, somewhere, but not of much interest,” then went back to his console.
If this was Star Trek, we’d be ejecting the warp coil by now, but in the space dock, that didn’t seem to me to be a viable option.
“How long before we can get this bucket of bolts moving,” I ask the Chief.
“I’m going as fast as I can.”
Yes, words ripped right out of the script of a Star Trek episode, I thought. A sad case of life imitating art.
A strange whistling sound emanated from the speakers, then the whoosh of the elevator just before the doors opened. OK, new ship, squeaky doors, another item to be put on the ‘look at’ list after the shakedown cruise.
The Captain had arrived.
“Why are dock workers still on the ship, Number One.”
For a moment there, I thought I was talking to John Luc Picard.
“Faulty warp coil. You know how it goes, save a billion by outsourcing to the cheapest supplier.”
The captain didn’t appreciate my sardonic humour, or my apparent disdain in outsourcing what we had once built ourselves.
He gave me a frown, a slight shake of his head, then said, “I’ll be in my quarters. Let me know when we’re about to leave.”
He didn’t wait for acknowledgement and disappeared through another squeaky door. More repairs.
The Chief’s voice then came over the speaker. “I can give you impulse speed, warp speed will take a little longer.”
“Doesn’t that refer to miracles over the impossible,” I ask.
“Perhaps. But in the meantime, I need a specific spanner and the replicators are down. So, now we have to fix them first, before moving on. Might take a while.”
I look around the crew, seeing their expectant faces drop with disappointment.
Outer space was going to have to wait a little longer.
This is the famous clock tower of the Flinders Street Station (the main train station for suburban trains) in Melbourne.
We were staying in a hotel (The Doubletree) directly opposite to the station and our room overlooked the station and the clock tower. I took photos of it during the day:
and this one, at night. It came out better than I thought it would.
How many of us have skeletons in the closet that we know nothing about? The skeletons we know about generally stay there, but those we do not, well, they have a habit of coming out of left field when we least expect it.
In this case, when you see your photo on a TV screen with the accompanying text that says you are wanted by every law enforcement agency in Europe, you’re in a state of shock, only to be compounded by those same police, armed and menacing, kicking the door down.
I’d been thinking about this premise for a while after I discovered my mother had a boyfriend before she married my father, a boyfriend who was, by all accounts, the man who was the love of her life.
Then, in terms of coming up with an idea for a story, what if she had a child by him that we didn’t know about, which might mean I had a half brother or sister I knew nothing about. It’s not an uncommon occurrence from what I’ve been researching.
There are many ways of putting a spin on this story.
Then, in the back of my mind, I remembered a story an acquaintance at work was once telling us over morning tea, that a friend of a friend had a mother who had a twin sister and that each of the sisters had a son by the same father, without each knowing of the father’s actions, both growing up without the other having any knowledge of their half brother, only to meet by accident on the other side of the world.
It was an encounter that in the scheme of things might never have happened, and each would have remained oblivious of the other.
For one sister, the relationship was over before she discovered she was pregnant, and therefore had not told the man he was a father. It was no surprise the relationship foundered when she discovered he was also having a relationship with her sister, a discovery that caused her to cut all ties with both of them and never speak to either from that day.
It’s a story with more twists and turns than a country lane!
I’d been on the starship for almost three hours when…
…
The captain was coming up from the earth station by transport, not wanting to trust the transporters, and I’d just finished the orientation of the ship by the second officer, and had arrived on the bridge to see various crew members hunched over their consoles.
The captain had told me, before stepping onto the transport, that we would be leaving the dock shortly after he arrived.
Nothing I’d seen so far had led me to believe it would be going anywhere, anytime soon.
Nevertheless, the crew briefing had run smoothly, the second officer assigned to correlate the complaints/problems list, and everyone else had taken their assigned positions.
I was waiting for the captain, standing beside the ‘chair’, ready to hand over. In any other situation, we would be off to an illustrious start.
Until the dulcet tones of the Chief Engineer rang through the bridge, uttering those fateful words, “the warp coil has had a catastrophic failure”.
This was at odds with another statement he had made earlier when I was in Engineering, and given I was told the Chief Engineer was prone to hyperbole; his statement ‘they just don’t make warp coils like they used to’ hadn’t exactly filled me with confidence, but I had been expecting we would be ready to depart.
I had been looking at the screen, an overlay of the window that looked out over space, or at this moment, the space dock, where there was a representation of the planets that were ‘out there’.
I had been curious about M75, but the helmsman, a rather taciturn chap who seemed to resent the fact he was assigned to this ship, just shrugged and said, “it’s something, somewhere, but not of much interest,” then went back to his console.
If this was Star Trek, we’d be ejecting the warp coil by now, but in the space dock, that didn’t seem to me to be a viable option.
“How long before we can get this bucket of bolts moving,” I ask the Chief.
“I’m going as fast as I can.”
Yes, words ripped right out of the script of a Star Trek episode, I thought. A sad case of life imitating art.
A strange whistling sound emanated from the speakers, then the whoosh of the elevator just before the doors opened. OK, new ship, squeaky doors, another item to be put on the ‘look at’ list after the shakedown cruise.
The Captain had arrived.
“Why are dock workers still on the ship, Number One.”
For a moment there, I thought I was talking to John Luc Picard.
“Faulty warp coil. You know how it goes, save a billion by outsourcing to the cheapest supplier.”
The captain didn’t appreciate my sardonic humour, or my apparent disdain in outsourcing what we had once built ourselves.
He gave me a frown, a slight shake of his head, then said, “I’ll be in my quarters. Let me know when we’re about to leave.”
He didn’t wait for acknowledgement and disappeared through another squeaky door. More repairs.
The Chief’s voice then came over the speaker. “I can give you impulse speed, warp speed will take a little longer.”
“Doesn’t that refer to miracles over the impossible,” I ask.
“Perhaps. But in the meantime, I need a specific spanner and the replicators are down. So, now we have to fix them first, before moving on. Might take a while.”
I look around the crew, seeing their expectant faces drop with disappointment.
Outer space was going to have to wait a little longer.
We have stayed in two different types of accommodation in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia, as a timeshare owner who can trade their week for a week anywhere in the world.
Both are resorts, but different sorts of resorts. The first was a typical RCI resort, where everything is laid back and relaxing, with all the amenities one can expect from a resort.
The other, this one, the Wyndham in Coffs Harbour, is very different, and you notice it when you walk in the front door. You are virtually assaulted by hard-nosed timeshare sales staff who really don’t take no for an answer, and then when you finally escape, ring you every day to make an appointment.
I left the phone off the hook.
Aside from that, the place is excellent, the accommodation very good, and the situation one of the best with what could be called a private beach. There are also a number of bushwalks that cater to old people like me.
As you can see, lakes and greenery, and even a putting green.
And in places, they try very hard to hide the ugly multi-story buildings in amongst the trees
It is only a short walk to the ‘private beach’ and it is sufficiently long enough for a morning walk before breakfast. You could even try to catch some fish for breakfast, though I’m not sure if anyone actually caught anything
Or you can just stare out to sea
And, back in the room, this is the view we had from our verandah
