That meant we weren’t out of the starting blocks as quickly as we might have been, but there was only one item on the To Do list - Mark had to return a hire car to where it had come from - so we headed back down to Ballina to check that no one at the resort needed a lift to the airport, and when no one did thought we might as well head out to the airport ourselves.
Once we were inside the terminal I would have been quite happy to stand around on the edge of things but Bill Payne insisted that we take a seat at the table in the coffee shop and we had a lengthy chat until it was time for the travellers to head into the Departure Lounge and the car to head back to the rental place in Byron.
We’d had to rent the townhouse for a week, and since Mark was heading to WA on Tuesday Madam and I had the run of the place until it was time to head north to go back to work and get involved with the community radio station which had started broadcasting over the Easter long weekend.
If my experiences over the preceding couple of years had done anything, they’d rekindled a desire to establish contact with people whose musical interests reflected mine.
Around the end of 1997 I’d run across the father of one of the kids in my class who was, coincidentally, chairing the committee that was launching Bowen’s community radio station GEM-FM.
Had I known what I was letting myself in for, I might well have restricted my comments to how Shucks was doing at school and refrained from volunteering myself for anything, but an expression of interest seemed a harmless enough idea, and I gave it very little thought until a phone call informed me that they were taking a group of people to Townsville for the first part of presenter training.
With hindsight, after a two-hour car trip on either side of an information session that was short on detail, contained next to nothing in the way of hands on activity and wasted an entire Sunday, I probably have kept my mouth firmly shut rather than volunteering to look after our presenter training when we were closer to having the station up and running.