Peninsula Hot Springs

The PHS features a hot natural mineral water but with a lot of help.  I have bathed in hot pools in NZ where the water is just running out of the ground and not a cent to pay. Here we have to bore down and bring it to the surface. Nevertheless it is unique in Australia. There are your various spa towns like Hepburn but that one and also Clifton Springs (mentioned elsewhere in ROBOT) started out by getting you to drink the stuff. Later they started heating it for bathing. The closest I have found to this phenomenon is in the NT in Litchfield where warm water cascades into pools after being heated by the rocks it passes over.
I would recommend trying this. Get there on a midweek day not in school holidays, at 9:30am. This allows half an hour for the "No kids on the hilltop" rule to take effect at 10:00am. Don't be put off by the endless cars parked seemingly forever. There seems to be plenty of room to spread out in side.

They do mean Hot

Orakei Korako

Da Vinci Room

Escape rooms are games where you have to follow clues and solve cyphers to get yourself out of the room. A 3D puzzle as such. I have heard that there are more elaborate schemes like this involving a whole house in Flemington.  Our team had enough trouble with one Da Vinci room.  The post mortem discussion suggested that we reveal the hints (QR codes) in a more timely way perhaps then allowing more progress through the maze rather than trying to get the lowest score. Our 50 minutes was up and we had to be let out.

Dan Brown we're not

Wardrobe Reveal

Strike at HighPoint

 I had forgotten how physical bowling can be.  We had around 20 of us for the continuing 60th birthday bizzo. The older venues never had a bar as far as I can remember. The old haunt we went to in Fletcher St closed up years ago so Strike must be reinventing things. 
 I remember at about age 20 and in my first week of work at the MMBW, there was a gathering around someone's desk whom I did not know. He had turned 65 and was compulsorily being retired.  I had a few brief words as he was about to leave. He could not afford to retire, was still paying off the house and needed to work. He said voluntarily you could leave as early as 55 and forcibly you had to go at 65. So after the first week in work I thought ok I will split the difference and aim to retire at 60 and also have the house paid off.  It turned out fairly close to that.

Ball weight

4 strikes in a row

Atlas of Remote Islands

Judith Schalansky has declared this book is about "50 islands she has never visited and never will". If you are born on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall then I guess you might only write about places but never visit them. As I was reading through, I wondered if there will be an island featured that I have been to. Sure enough the Cook Islands gets a mention with its Pacific name of PukaPuka, however this island is 1300km from Rarotonga, so with all of James Cook's travels there must be numerous Cook Islands. Islands that are remote from Berlin may not be remote from Australia, so Norfolk Island hardly seems that far away to me. My  parents made it that far.
Judy Judy Judy writes a short story for each island. We are going back to Lord Howe Island next year. This could have qualified for her book, with plenty of story material as previously mentioned in ROBOT about Lord Howe like "The Return of the Phasmids" for instance.

Aitutaki

The Puzzling Photo

It has been said that the fifth sign of retirement is doing jigsaw puzzles. I beg to differ.  The below photo of the Red Circle was completed some 30 yar ago and was a tad difficult. Also in the recent video of the AT I posted the other day, you may have noticed an open to the public community jigsaw puzzle just sitting in the common room waiting for a passerby to add a piece here or a piece there. It just so happens I did complete a puzzle the other day which was unique in that I took the photo that is it's subject.
There is a measure of control over your own puzzle experience when you are responsible for deciding the content, especially when the cut out frame does not produce sufficiently unique shapes for each piece. The Red Circle was essential in having uniquely shaped puzzle pieces.  The Bay of Silence puzzle had a sand section that I am still not sure is put together correctly, as some pieces seemed to interchange.
This puzzle is another way of reliving our recent Europe trip. There is a black art in selecting the puzzling photo. The detail here was good in three quarters with boats and apartments divided by the bikini girl but more towels or people were needed on the sand.

The Red Circle

Bay of Silence

A Walk in the Woods - Revisited

This would be the only time I have finished reading a book and then went to see the film it was made into, on the same day.  The Art Deco Sun Theatre is a good place to see a film especially the small theatres with the comfy armchairs. You have got the café scene, the picture show and a book shop all in the one place.  The film departs from the book mainly to do with using cars (and bears). In the book Bryson used a car often but they only flirt with its use in the film. As a rule I preferred to have no contact with  outside influences during a walk, particularly when you climbed to a vantage point only to find a car park already there.

60th Birthday Sun Theatre

Kindred Spirits

A Walk in the Woods

I have just read this book by Bill Bryson who is probably not the most athletic of bushwalkers.  In attempting to walk the entire Appalachian Trail he managed to do around one third.  Having done a lot of walking myself, his efforts seemed clumsy at best but he started his AT walk at the age of 44. Nevertheless there were many anecdotes he described which I could relate to.  I had a fleeting glimpse of the AT in 2007 by parking nearby, taking a walk and then driving away. This was the modus operandi of Bill as well none of this end to end business.

Bushwalkers food of champions!