Friday 30 August 2013 – Hervey Bay

Well the second last day of winter and today has been 28 degrees!  After breakfast we went for a walk which turned out to be a marathon today.  We left the camp at 9.30 and got back at 12.30, so the walk was longer than usual, but there were a few chats along the way as well.

The sea looked like a mirror this morning as we got onto the sand – it was just amazingly calm.  We hadn’t gone far when we saw some dolphins playing off shore, when a couple of young travellers who were heading in for a swim asked: Have you seen the dolphins?  That of course got us chatting and it turns out that the fellow is French (from Bordeaux) and the girl is German (from Berlin), both are here on one year working visas, and so far he has spent the months travelling and working between Cairns and here, and the girl has a job here.  They are soon heading to Sydney and then he is going to Tasmania.  They seemed nice young people.

Lots of people walk on the beach, and after another half an hour or so I saw a couple walking towards us, but still a couple of hundred metres away from us, and I said to Grant that I reckoned it was Adrian and Linda (my cousins), and sure enough it was.  So we stopped and talked to them for a while, then we continued on in the direction we were going, while they changed direction and walked with us for another twenty minutes or so, then we all turned around and headed back our way.  Half way back they detoured to a kiosk for lunch and we continued on home – having another couple of instances of passing the time of day and a bit more conversation.  I even was given the business card of a local estate agent who we chatted to while he was having his lunch break on the foreshore!  We even had a phone call on the walk – Don Palmer, one of Grant’s old footy coaches rang.

It was obviously cuppa time when we returned to the park, and lunch as well.  But I’d just got to the van door when Bill Houston rang to thank us for the birthday card we sent him, so the cuppa was delayed a bit.  After lunch we just sat around and read, did crosswords, etc until about three o’clock.  I went for a shower to get the sand and salt off me, then about a quarter to four Grant went off fishing – from the jetty at Torquay just about a kilometre from here. Just before he left, Lauren Keating rang to say hello and to let us know that the family is at Gary’s this weekend sorting out a bit of his stuff, so we had a good talk to her.

I went to the recreation room here as there was an entertainer – a bloke about our age called Graeme Smart who sang songs from the 50’s to the 80’s.  He was pretty good – a bit of a rocker in his day I would say, and I scored a soft teddy bear which he threw out to me when he was singing Elvis’s song.  He sang from 4 till about 6.15.  About twenty five or thirty people from the park went to hear him.

Grant got home at about 7.15 after another successful fishing expedition.  He went to the local smallish jetty and came home with a shark!!!  Not a huge one, but probably about the same size as last week’s mackerel.  Photo evidence follows.  Next time I’m going fishing, too!!