Stayed
at ‘Orchard
Cottages’, ["Sleep
to the sound of the ocean, wake to the sound of the birds"] 18 Gipps
Street, Port Fairy last night. A beautiful crafted cottage – we kept the fire
burning all night. We looked at house prices for this ‘magical place’ (it said
the locals called this place ‘magical’ in the tourist brochures) but everything
was beyond our ability to buy a holiday home or a permanent home. The cheapest
two-bedroom plywood houses that would be a few dollars and a handful of loose
change in upstate New York were in
the three to five hundred thousand dollar mark. We found an ad for the cheapest
place available; $179,000 somewhere on the road to Hamilton in Orford. We could not find the road to Orford and ended
up driving on very narrow one-lane roads that wound through the Victorian countryside.
We gave up and realised why the three-acre property was cheap – it was impossible
to find and the countryside looked like the west coast of Ireland.
The area was originally settled by Irish fishermen and Port Fairy was originally
called Belfast. We did the usual tourist
thing at the Blue Lake in
Mount Gambier – taking photos of one another
in front of the ‘extinct’ volcano pool. I was here in 1992 with my 87 year-old
father and Sacha and Leigh and now he is 100 back in New York, Leigh is dead,
Sacha I saw a few days ago back in Melbourne and … well … on we go.Tonight
we are staying at the Lake Albert caravan park in a cabin, no where near as good as the one
in Port Fairy, but on par with where we stayed two nights ago in Lorne. Tomorrow
we finish our holiday within a holiday within a life that is nothing but a holiday
if that is what it really is. I suppose it is all in one’s interpretation of
life whether this life is a passing fun thingy or there is a purpose or we are
all a bundle of cells either having a good time or not having a good time.Tomorrow
we return our rental car and go back to whatever it is what we do seriously
in life. For me I suppose it is preparing classes for Albany
Academy and State University
at Albany. Tomorrow, being Monday, means we only have two-weeks before
we leave Adelaide and returning to Albany,
New York.
Technology Coordinator and Computer Teacher at Dalian American International School, 2 Dianchi Road, Golden Pebble Beach, Dealian Development Area 116650 P.R. China.
Today working on picture poem links starting around "better" (June 20, 2013 ). Picture poems are the digital format of work I did as a street artist in New Orleans in the 1970s, as well as New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco and Adelaide South Australia. Follow @neuage