Sparrow Lorelei and Robin Artemis photo gallery

To Narrandera and back, 24-26 July, 2011
Saturday afternoon

Narrandera Common. Sparrow is asleep, James is staying with her and (seeing as the weather is now nice and the shops are all closed) Robin and I have wandered off to find the common where the main nature reserve and koala reserve are. It's maybe one minute's walk in a straight line from the pontoon we were at just before, but a very wet straight line - to get to it involves getting to the other side of the lake first.

What's that up there? That is a tree.

These tree things are interesting.

But maybe it's time for a sleep. Robin started to grizzle a lot, his "I'm about to go to sleep and I'm tired" grizzle, so maybe it was just as well that the road into the reserve was flooded out by the Murrumbidgee River maybe three hundred metres in. I didn't walk very far with him. Didn't see any koalas either, though I wasn't expecting to at this point.

So back to the cabin for rest time for him and me too.

When Sparrow woke up we went to a place called My Dolls. It's a little old lady's house with a games room that's been filled with all the dolls she's collected over the last fifteen years or so. Masses of them, so many types. Sparrow was interested, would have liked to be allowed to play with some of them. The superhero action figures tied to the fence in the second photo were quite a delight to her as she could touch them. But once she'd been around the room once she was bored and started trying to play with knitting needles instead, so we didn't stay long.

Back at the main park in the late afternoon. There were a lot of young people there, sitting and having chats under trees, a couple of groups kicking a football around on the oval, and the adventure playground and skate ramp area were both getting heavy use. I suspect this is partly deliberate on the town's part - in a town where the shops all shut at noon on Saturday, you need to have places where the teenagers etc can congregate in a useful manner. So the facilities in this park were quite good. In the top photo James and Sparrow are way off in the distance at the grandstand, where Sparrow is running up and down the steps. Robin is with me, having a feed - this is his post-feed milk-drunk look. He's almost outgrown this jumper already - such a chubby baby! Sparrow loved watching the kids at the skate ramp, as usual. We will have to get her a scooter sometime in the next year, she's just infatuated with moving machines (and I refuse to get her her own helicopter). She also really liked the sand. This was the only place I really saw the sand that Narrandera is built on. They have descriptions in the early historical stuff of how the town was so neatly built and well maintained but the streets were nothing but thick red sand almost up to your knees, and they make a point of talking about how in the 1800s sometime the town council developed an irrigation system to take water from the Murrumbidgee (which the town is on) to create grassy parks and gardens and to line the streets with London plane trees. They did a good job I guess, you can hardly see the sand anywhere.

Protected by Logic. I rather liked this (very old) sticker. I wonder if you could do something similar for atheists to use against religious doorknockers.

Dinner at Venice Pizza and Pasta. I had to laugh. My restaurant curse works even here. I'd picked this out that morning as the place to eat (out of maybe four or five dinner options available in the town on a Saturday night). I don't usually make a decision that easily, but I was sure I'd be able to eat anything they made. So when we got there, right on opening time (we were all hungry), the cook had failed to show up. And not some random teenager, either, it was the owner's wife and he was getting a little worried. So James and Robin waited to see if they would be opening for dinner that night while Sparrow and I wandered down the street and got some chicken nuggets from a (fairly popular with families) takeaway across the road. I was thinking that that would keep Sparrow going given she was already asking for food and we didn't know when or where we'd be eating dinner. But then she decided that, unlike last night, chicken nuggets OBVIOUSLY weren't food. We came back to the pasta place and the chef had arrived and they were working on our order. When it arrived it was tasty enough, but I was reminded that we have been spoilt a bit living in Melbourne. The food here really is quite high quality, even from the little home-run takeaways. The pasta we were served was a little ordinary. It made it harder to convince Sparrow to eat it. But we just left her, she didn't eat much and that was OK. She'll get used to the idea of "this is what there is for dinner and that's it" eventually.