We have had a wonderful few days in Port Macquarie – taking it easy and catching up with friends.
It was great to see my friend Max again. He is an old mate from my army days and one of those special friends that even though we don’t see each other all that often, we can still pick up a conversation from where we left off last time.
We arrived here on Satuday afternoon and found that Port Macquarie has changed considerably since we were last here in 1988 and almost completely since our honeymoon in 1972. This place is booming! There are new developments in all directions and hardly anything that we can remember. It seems that there is a real estate agent on every corner!
We spent most of Sunday with Max at his home at Upper Rollands Plains. He has a property on the river and raises a few cattle and runs a small plant nursery. He has a lovely and very colourful house. We took a picnic lunch and acted as guinea pigs as Max tried out huis new coffee making machine. The coffee certainly got better with every cup.
On that evening, we had a beautiful dinner with Wal and Collette who we met on our trip to Canada in 2003. We enjoyed the reminiscing and caught up with each other’s doings since that trip.
On Monday, we pottered around the shops in the morning and enjoyed the warmer weather. It has been about 21 degrees on each of the days that we have been here and the weather has been very pleasant. Max came into town for the afternoon and took us for a tour of the beaches to the south of Port Macquarie as well as to the lookout at North Brother Mountain. We finished the day with dinner together at a Thai restaurant in town.
Today, (Tuesday) our last day here, we drove around some of the newer housing developments in the area and looked at some of the new estates. I think that half of the population of Melbourne and Sydney must have moved here over the last ten years. Port Macquaruie is well srerved with shops and all of the major retail chains. We had a very nice lunch at Cassegrains winery and then drove to Warchope for a look around the town there. Max met us again for dinner and afterwards we said our goodbyes so that he could get home before it was too late. We hope to see each other again early next year when he comes to Melbourne after Max has been to Vietnam.
Tomorrow we head south towards home and expect to stay overnight somewhere to the north of Sydney.
