Yet another 'first' for me during this trip - being breathalysed. The NSW police are obsessed with speed traps and drink-driving traps. Apparently it's less about safety and more about revenue... I was driving away from my meeting with Jenny and Minnie when I encountered an organised breathalyser trap, and was beckoned into a cordoned area on the roadside and asked to count from one to ten into an alcohol meter. I suppose it's a good idea to do spot-checks at 2.30pm on a Friday afternoon, but really, the available resources to undertake speed and alcohol checking is huge, compared to the UK.
Took Marcus and Al to dinner last night and discovered that while downtown Katoomba leaves a lot to be desired, neighbouring Leura is an altogether more ritzy affair - reminds me a little of Crouch End in North London, where you are hard pressed to find a newsagent but will never run out of scented candles, expensive nick-nacks or gourmet coffee. A lovely but hair-raisingly expensive dinner, and much chuckling was had by all.
Overnight the rains came. Being 3,300 ft above sea level, it's not so much being under a rain cloud as right inside one. Al and I dashed through the deluge to meet a friend of his for breakfast in Leura, a rather lovely woman called Wendy with a permanent mischevous twinkle in her eye - if anyone watches The Good Wife, imagine Jackie having a more irreverant older sister. Also present was a man Al hadn't previously met, who turned out to have gone to school at Beaudesert in Minchinhampton in the 1940s! Discussion wandered from Margaret Thatcher to Julia Gillard to the role of the British within the history of slavery. Really rather needed to have my wits about me, but stated my case regarding Thatcher with some passion. Now we are invited to a pub dinner with Wendy on Tuesday eveing, so I can only assume I didn't disgrace myself!
Brandishing an enormous umbrella, I then ran to my car and drove to Penrith (pronounced PEN-rith, rather than our Cumbrian Pen-RITH), some 40 miles down the mountain, where I met my friend Kim and her little girls for lunch, at the Penrith Panthers centre, a sort of entertainment complex/casino/rugby ground. Kim looked fantastic and the girls presented me with drawings - loved how Jasmine had drawn me in a 'rainbow car'! As the girls tucked into pizzas, Kim and I caught up on 12 months of life lived since last we saw each other. She doesn't seem to have gotten any older since we first met in 1998, which I suspect has something to do with yoga and good genes! A lovely few hours nattering and watching the girls playing, before we say our farewells and I head off for the drive back up the mountain, before realising I had left the flippin' umbrella at the coat-check! The sun is fighting to emerge as I again begin my ascent until about 10 miles from Katoomba I drive right back into the cloud again, and that is where I am now, thousands of feet up in the clouds.
So that's why I am sleeping so well!
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