22.04.2010

It’s all about the sky.

One of the great and rather unexpected delights of this tour so far has been the sky. Particularly when we are driving from place to place, which is when we see a lot of it. It is so big and so beautiful. I don’t know whether it is the time of year, or luck, or just because I live in the city, but almost every time we do a long drive the sky and the clouds have been totally magnificent. We have seen storms approaching, quite a bit of rain, rainbows, sun showers, sunsets and all sorts of wild and amazing cloud formations and the most incredible combinations and shades of blue, indigo, violet, lavender, cream, white, grey, pink, rose, and many many others. It’s been fantastic.

Last week we were in Gippsland: Warrigal, Traralgon, Wonthaggi and Ringwood. One of the highlights was arriving in Wonthaggi at about 11.30am on a balmy Friday and then discovering the beach and a man-altered rock pool at Cape Paterson, which is about 10 mins out of Wonthaggi. We raced back to the motel, grabbed bathers and some lunch and then spent a wonderful couple of hours at the beach, swimming, playing and walking. The landscape is amazing there, quite wild and rugged, with cliffs and almost black rocks, and a steeply shelving beach which the waves pounded on, but there is also a more sheltered bay and the pool, and it was really quite warm, so very easy to while away the warm afternoon there.

It was especially nice for me because I hadn’t particularly enjoyed Traralgon: the motel wasn’t great and I felt a bit stuck, I couldn’t really find a way out of the feeling of a small, and somewhat unprepossessing, town even though I went out and had a swim, which definitely helped. So to get out of the motel early in Wonthaggi and see such beautiful landscape was fabulous. In fact, Wonthaggi, together with Bendigo, is my favourite town we have visited so far. It has a lovely feel to it. Laid back and easy, but also somehow open. I felt like I could live there. I don’t know, of course, if I actually could, but it felt possible, whereas living in Traralgon definitely did not feel possible!

This week, (Mooroopna, Swan Hill, and Benalla so far) we have had a gorgeous drive from Shepparton to Swan Hill, and then the bonus of a hotel up-grade because there was an error in the bookings…(thankyou very much!) We were in the Best Western Resort, which had an indoor and outdoor pool, nice light and clean rooms, a sauna, spa, gym and table tennis table. It was a lot of fun. I also squeezed in a beautiful two hour walk along the banks of the Murray, and saw lots of birds and large, happy trees. The river had SOME water in it, although not heaps because a lot has gone out down the irrigation channels, but that has made everyone very happy! Not so the locusts, which due to the unseasonably warm weather are in large numbers. Apparently this does not bode well for the Spring, because they lay their eggs now, the lie dormant and then spring out in Spring, all springy, and STARVING. They can eat a crop in a day.

Claire, our stage manager, filled my acting week with joy when she sorted out Ruth’s pills into colours (Ruth is my character and at a certain point in the play she distributes medication to the rest of the inmates of the asylum.) They looked so pretty in the pill-box, that Ruth has had a smile on her face all week. (Except when Doug is hassling her of course.)

One last thing I am just loving and really appreciating is the hospitality shown to us by various venues. For the most part the staff at the venues are really helpful, happy to see us, and very welcoming. Sometime there is a coffee/tea/biscuit station set up backstage, often we are offered drinks after the show, and we have even been given a box of Danish biscuits and last night we were given half a box of wine!!! It certainly makes us feel looked after and helps take the edge off the tiring nature of life on the road.