The small towns we passed were a delight. The ones off the main roads have managed to keep a charm that will become the real tourist attraction of the area. Preserve, preserve!

This is the Koorawatha Memorial Hall. God bless its little corrugated iron supper room.

And the Koorawatha Road House. Meals, Hamburgers, Drinks.

It's just opposite the two story Koorawatha Hotel with a lovely old verandah and big curved front windows.





Not being too rushed about the time we had left home, it was lunchtime when we stopped at Young. We'd planned to visit  Zouch, a restaurant in the old  Masonic Hall. Zouch has a huge inside room that you rattle around in a bit, even with some attempt to break up the space with standing divider screens. There's a small sunny courtyard outside where the wind sometimes wafts the smell of the next door KFC, but inside it's very pleasant and cool in summer. The chef Susie Forrest came out to say hello when I showed one of the staff my Brewers Winter Feast photographs after noticing that they also sold Scott Watkins-Sully's Braidwood ales at Zouch.

After lunch, we visited the Equitas fruit packing factory. While marveling at the technology that grades fruit by colour and accurate size, it still sends them to be hand checked at an assembly line that would be as much at home with grading computer parts as it was with our cherries.



The activity was intense and like all assembly lines, continuous. There wasn't much talking or laughing (although I'm sure they do) and this image of a girl with a faraway look, pale and dreamlike in the fluoro lights summed up how I felt about it.

Do we really want our fruit to be so consistent that it looks factory made?

 This old photo was in the Young Tourist office and suggests much different times. 'H. James, Produce Dealer' has bags of flour in the window and he sold Ogden's Guinea Gold tobacco
(Ogden's Nut gone Flake featured in a diary entry here)

And if you look closely, there was this well dressed delivery boy, in cap, jacket, short britches and long socks.

Thursday 24 November '04

Millthorpe is surrounded by vineyards and green fields, there's a classic country pub next to the old railway station and an upmarket restaurant, Tonic in a beautifully restored old corner emporium.

There was a lady painting a watercolour of the street, and as I photographed she despaired of capturing its charm.

The Millthorpe Grand Western Lodge was built in 1901 and dominates the wide main intersection. At a time when travellers passed through the town from Sydney, it boasted "forty expensively furnished accommodation  rooms, three sitting rooms, two dining rooms, a billiards room, two bars with gold inlaid cedar counters, gas lighting and modern features".

Cowra's Japanese Gardens however were a disappointment. There are some areas where you feel there's an esthetic involved, but the rest looks like a low budget theme park. There are parts where the curving paths and artfully placed rocks look like they were there for years but I'll give it another ten years of growing and maturing before I visit again.
 

Much more 'finished' was their display of bonsai, including this small grove of Japanese maple. I like bonsai, Jan doesn't, she thinks it's artificial but to me there's a feeling of the magical about them. I know how hard they are to look after. I've killed a few some years ago, that were neglected for just a matter of days. Sorry trees.

Even allowing time for the vegetation to grow, I suspect that the 'theme park' elements will still be there, such as the crudely placed signs that tell you which button to press on the hand held audio tour for a description. I skipped the $5 device for the free map.

Equally disappointing was their standard theme park restaurant The Red Carp. If you thought you might get a Japanese meal, maybe a noodle or sushi, forget it. The specials board promised a Fisherman's Basket and Chicken 'Snitzel' topped with bacon, pineapple and cheese. We passed on the Red Carp restaurant. They had nice graphics though.

Instead we bought some take away products from the Cowra Smokehouse, (including some great smoked sun dried tomatoes and some smoked trout pate), teamed with some wimpy white bread rolls from a Vietnamese hot bread shop in the main street, a bottle of water we had ourselves a picnic.

(That's unless they're like the Santa decorations on our Royal hotel a year or two back that stayed up for a couple of Christmases. A few reindeer lost their heads and it looked pretty tatty but it finally came down during the year.)