Cooktown
With a fair idea of the lie of the land, we'd decided Thursday was the in town day, largely due to the guided tour of the Botanical Gardens that runs from ten o'clock each Thursday.
I was half inclined to go on that myself, but experience suggested the tour would be followed by extensive photographic action, and I wanted to get in and have a look at the Historical Society Museum as well...
There was also a load of washing to do dealt with some time during the day, so the eventual plan of attack involved breakfast at the kiosk on the wharf, a quick trip out to Finch's Bay, calling in to the Botanic Gardens along the way to verify the starting time for the botanical tour, drop Hughesy at the Historical Society and head back to the wharf for fish and chips for lunch.
Remarks about lengthy photographic sessions might seem flippant, but I'm currently sitting in the Historical Society tapping this section of the travelogue at 11:33 with no sign of the lift to lunch.
Breakfast looking out over the water was very pleasant, something that'll definitely be repeated, maybe not tomorrow or before we head off on Saturday morning, but then again you never know.
Finch's Bay was apparently a popular swimming spot way back when, not that you'd know it from the road that gets you there. The bitumen stops right after the Gardens and the track meanders through the scrub, delivering you to a broad sandy beach with rainforest running right down to the waterline from the outliers of Mount Cook on the right and from the slopes of Grassy Hill on the left.
I was back in town outside the Historical Society by a quarter to ten, and a careful walk around the displays revealed a wealth of detail that filled in gaps in the memory and added fresh detail that'll come in useful if and when I decide to have another go at the frontier violence that followed the settlement of Cooktown.
I could have taken extensive notes, but opted, in the end, for hard copies of a couple of the Society's publications (Cooktown through the Years, Peninsula Pub Crawl and The Rail to Nowhere) that'll do a far more thorough job than an hour's hasty scribbling could possibly deliver.
The bloke looking after the door, Jim and the women who were working away inside delivered very welcome news regarding the fate of the Cooktown newspapers I'd perused back in the mid- to late-seventies which I assumed would have fallen to pieces long ago.
I was reading them in the old Bellevue Hotel, across the road from the Queensland Parliament and once home to the rural representatives in the state legislature. The building had been demolished in controversial circumstances during the Bjelke-Petersen era, and I had a sneaking suspicion those runs of the Cooktown Courier and the Cooktown Herald might have ended up in the rubble.
Fortunately, however, they seem to have survived and have even been microfilmed. there are apparently plans to digitise the microfilm at the National Library in Canberra, though one doubts a couple of files of Cooktown newspapers are very high on the pecking order.
As far as the Historical Society Museum is concerned, at $5 admission it's cheaper than the James Cook, and being relatively light on for Jimmy Content (and quite rightly so, if there's only so much display material relating to the Endeavour you'd expect to find it in a central location) it's able to go into a fair bit more detail about individuals and families.
If you're interested in the history, in other words, do the James Cook first, decide whether you want further information, and if you're even slightly inclined to tick that box head straight for the Historical Society. It really is very good.
From the Historical Society Museum the next items on the agenda were an appointment with a washing machine and a tumble drier and lunch. Both of those seemed best tackled in the vicinity of the Fisherman's Wharf, and after depositing the laundry in a machine and depositing four $1 coins in its innards we set off for Gilld and Guttd for a round of fish and chips consumed at a table overlooking the river mouth with views across to Cape Bedford.
Fish and chips, in most cases, is fish and chips and provided things have been done right nothing more needs to be said. I've had some pretty good examples of the combination over the years with the best (Swains in Gladstone - highly recommended) being quite sublime and while what we found here wasn't quite up there it was an example of what you get when things are done right.
From there the laundry went into the dryer, Hughesy set out in search of the elusive Commonwealth Bank auto teller and a query in the Post Office revealed that the EFTPOS machine there was as close as I was going to get.
Two runs through the spin drier had got the laundry to the point where a light airing would finish the job, so it was a case of back to base with a walk from the Botanic Gardens pencilled in for the late afternoon, followed by a jaunt up to the windswept summit of Grassy Hill.
The spell back at base allowed me to catch up on the travelogue, to the point where, more than half way through the trip I'm right up to date with the day to day detail and I had the time to peruse the publications I'd picked up at the Historical Society and followed that with a spot of quiet R&R instead.
That didn't last too long, in any case, and it was just after three-thirty when we headed back towards the Botanical Gardens and the walking track to Finch Bay. It's part of the Scenic Rim Walking Trail, and we'd looked at adding assorted other sections to the schedule, but given the up hill and down dale nature of the track we'd probably have been rearranging the plans pretty smartly if we'd included the Finch Bay to Cherry Tree Bay and Cherry Tree Bay to Grassy Hill tracks in the plans. Maybe if we hadn't spent those hours clambering over the top out near Laura...
As it was, about half way along the Finch Bay track there was an unanimous we'll be heading back to the Botanic Gardens along the road, since we knew that route was almost totally flat.
Don't get me wrong. It wasn't a case of being anti-exercise. I like walking, but at this point in time I'd prefer to walk the climbing-induced aches out of the leg muscles along a relatively flat surface.
That was not, however, going to be possible if I wanted to get all the way to the top of Grassy Hill. Madam had been up there the previous afternoon, and hadn't revealed too much detail about the top, except to remark that the view was spectacular and that the conditions up there were windy.
We'd already received comments about wind from friends and acquaintances, and when someone from Blowin’ Bowen tells you a place is windy, you better believe it's windy, boys and girls.
Now we could probably have ignored the signs that advised the road loop was for buses and disabled people only and driven further up, but we're law-abiding citizens and we walked from the car park to the summit.
We didn't have much else pencilled in between Grassy Hill and dinner at the Bowls Club and I could probably have stayed up there, meditating on matters historical and the ways of this wicked world until Madam had finished capturing (photographers, in case you didn't know, don't merely take photos, they capture images) the sunset if it wasn't for the wind.
Back in the car we headed back down, pausing for a bit at the second car park and lookout, where the views were almost as spectacular but didn't give you the full three-sixty, and headed down to the shores of the Endeavour to fill in the time until we signed ourselves in at the Bowls Club for dinner.
Sunset turned out to be a bit more spectacular than Madam had expected, given the light conditions when we were atop Grassy Hill and it was around a quarter to six when I managed to prise her away from the setting sun and point us in the direction of dinner.
To the best of my recollection I've never eaten in a bowls club, and I doubt there's a bowls club in any town of a similar size that has an eatery with a menu to match this operation. Actually, there aren't too many restaurants that have a menu that would match what's on offer here.
The two-sided menu board covering the current specials would probably do for some eateries, and there's a full a la carte menu on the tables offering the usual categories with ample variety within each, and as I made my way up to the servers to order Madam's grilled wild barramundi I was still tossing up options.
There's a blackboard menu above the servers that didn't seem to be quite the same as the one on thee table, and another on the left hand side that had some of the specials listed outside plus a few I didn't recall seeing before.
Overwhelmed by choice, I ended up going for the Cajun Porterhouse with chips and salad, and got to do the swapsies bit with Madam (a portion of porterhouse for a bit of Barra) and can wholeheartedly recommend either. If the rest of the menu matches what we had that night (and the place is almost universally regarded as offering the best food in town), you'd probably be able to eat there three or four times a week for at least a month before you went into I've tried everything and it's time for a change mode.
Back at Milkwood Lodge I settled on the veranda for a glass or two of red and a listen to some Levon Helm while Madam clarified a few details about Sunday over the phone and it was another case of early to bed.