A Power Outage Date Day

Last week the co driver and I had another date day.
We’d been notified our power would be out all day as the company was doing some major work on poles/lines in our area.
So we headed off up north to beautiful Jervis Bay and its major town Huskisson where she wanted to look at kayaks at a specialist store there. She wanted a much lighter one than she has now and has been looking on Gumtree for months for a second hand one with no luck.
She has difficulty loading and unloading her current one without assistance. They had a good range to look at but virtually none to sell. There’s been a shortage of stock for over a year. They all come from China and there are covid production and shipping delays. Earliest arrival for one ordered now was September.

Anyway the bullet was bitten and a carbon fibre model (VERY green colour) which is about the lightest you can get was ordered. It has a weight difference of around 7.5kg to her one which is substantial. I think she’s going to call it Kermit.
Then after sitting in the sun drinking a coffee to celebrate, we drove further north to Berry for lunch.
The co driver had a number of stops planned along the way but with it being a long weekend (Kings Birthday), we didn’t want to get caught up in holiday traffic heading home too late in the day. We’d spent so long at the kayak shop she had to make a few cuts in the itinerary.
In Berry we had a nice lunch as usual at our fave, The Emporium, which has been taken over by a new owner and modernised. But food standard is still good.
Then we separated and she went to her usual book and quilt stores, while I headed for the local Berry wine shop. I have been a regular customer there for ever. The owner, Justin, has a great wine knowledge and stocks a quirky range of Australian and overseas wines. He tastes each one before stocking it and has his tasting notes readily available.
I hadn’t been there since covid so was a little shocked at the prices in general. There was not much available under my price limit. But I eventually found six bottles, reds, that sounded interesting.

                                          -Jervis Bay-

We then met up at the car park and we headed south stopping only briefly at a quilt store in Nowra.
The drive home was fine with no hold ups. We obviously missed the holiday traffic.
The power was back on when we got home but there was no internet.
I checked with neighbours and they were ‘out’ too.
Our provider said it would be ‘down’ for a few days but was back on late the next evening. They were doing maintenance work on the phone towers from where we get our fixed wireless signal.
So that meant no TV for us as we are totally reliant on the internet for programming. We had ‘dumped’ our satellite service some time ago and cannot get free to air reception in our area without major infrastructure on our roof.

It was a night to drink wine and read books.

A nice change.