Weekend With Sister

 Colleague went off to spend a weekend doing  epic things with kitchens and Sister arrived to keep me out of mischief in my weekend in Roma.  Sister had wheels which released me from the necessity to walk everywhere and allowed me to buy heavy groceries which believe me is something you take for granted until you have to carry them home up Hospital hill with an altitude of (gasp!) all of 12 vertical metres.

The Sister weekend started at the Mitchell Spa, where I made up for the tragic disappointment endured at the Cunnamulla Spa.  The Mitchell Spa had regular opening hours and was full of Grey Nomads gently poaching themselves in the waters.

In theory one poaches oneself until approaching spontaneous combustion, and then cools off with a dip in the cool (not hot from the Artesian Basin) pool.  In reality the cool pool is usually empty because it's cold and nobody came here to sit in a cold pool, did they?

Behind the pool the old Booringa Shire Work Shed, now houseing a museum, boasted an open day with DJ, sausage sizzle, and market stalls.  When we had poached enough we went over to the museum and wandered through looking at old things and eating sizzled sausages until we were ready to poach again.

 

We spent the rest of the weekend sampling all that Roma had to offer:

First the Sculpture Park, due to open with this year's collection of sculptures on the same day that I left town, so all I got to see was last year's sculptures and the gravel bases for this year's exhibits.

 Second, Moorelands Nursery, with views out over grassy plains, all kinds of glass ornaments and pretty things for gardens, and the odd hopeful butterfly mistaking pictures for flowers.

That wasn't all either, we had the nicest cup of tea amongst the bouganvilleau blossoms and said hello to a very stand-offish backyard rooster on the way out to the car.

All that socialising and traipsing around got quite exhausting so we recovered with jigsaw puzzles and  Jenga at the staff quarters.  I wasn't very good at Jenga which was, of course, purely the fault of the uneven table top.

She's too good at this.

 

On Monday morning I got up with the sun and walked downtown for breakfast with sister before she went back to her usual life and I went back to the office.

Roma sunrise.