Archive for April, 2008

Arrived at The Entrance on Friday and arranged to do the market at Ettalong on Saturday and Sunday.  We we both surprised by how nice The Entrance is.  The town is beautiful and the Plaza is just something else.  A huge outdoor area, cafes, restaurants, little wading pools for the kids, fountains, a carousel and a band playing all weekend.
We booked into the Dunleith Caravan Park and picked up an information brochure.  We discovered that there was a market in The Entrance on both Saturday and Sunday.  Unfortunately, we were too late to contact the organisers for the Saturday market so we went along to Ettalong Beach as planned.
The market was held in a complex which housed a motel, a cinema paradiso and some shops as well as the market stalls.  We had a not too bad market, not great but not disastrous
On Sunday Chill and Mrs. Chill drove up to the entrance to retrieve their rubber mallet which Motley1 had purloined on our stay at their park.
On our last visit he helped himself to an extra power board, so Chill was loath to see the last of his mallet
The market on Sunday was tiny with just a few stalls and although we didn’t sell that much we made some good contacts for future sales to clubs etc.
We stayed in The Entrance for another couple of days to have a good look around the area before heading off up to Forster.  This has been our third stop in
Forster, you would think we liked the place or something
This time we stayed at Lani’s Holiday Island.  There weren’t a lot of peole around so it was quiet for most of the time.  We caught up with friends
for lunch and spent most of the time working on making new stock.
On the Saturday we went to the market at Bulahdelah, again a small market but not too bad.  The weather had been deteriorating each day for the previous week
and on the Friday night there was an enormous downpour of rain.  Saturday stayed dry until the market was over and we were back in the caravan park and then the heavens opened and it rained for the rest of the day and night.
Sunday morning was rain free, so we set off for Hallidays Point and the Blackhead Bazaar.  This was a big craft market, lots of different stalls and was shaping
up to being our best market for quite some time.  11.00 A.M. and down came the rain..oh how it rained.   This brought the market to an abrupt end as not even
ducks were stupid enough to hang around in this downpour.
Whilst we were in Forster we had an adopted member of the family.  She moved in the day after we arrived, made herself at home and cried, truly, when we
were leaving.  She was a most affectionate cat and obviously lived with someone in the park but preferred our company to her owners.  Well, why not?
We couldn’t get this other squatter, who was living on the awning to move either.  It didn’t want to leave even as we were taking down the awning and folding it up.

We headed North once more and stopped near Port Macquarie where Motley1 remembered that we hadn’t taken a picture of the van for the blog.  So here it is !
Now if you go back to the picture of the cat you will see our new flooring tiles too.  We need to find some decals for the van now, unlikely we will find Viscount
decals but it really does need those stripes or something back on there.

Here we came across the first petrol over $1.50.  It is the start of the NSW school holidays today but we all know we are not being ripped off and having price rises
just because people will be travelling this weekend, don’t we?
We stopped at Coffs Harbour and were in two minds whether to stay here and do the market or not as the weather was still wet and windy and the nights
were fairly cool.  We decided that we would stay and booked into the Woolgoolga & Coffs Harbour markets for this weekend.  We really liked Woolgoolga last time
we were here and had a really good market then too.  The weather was kind to us and the rain showed no sign of appearing but we were given an absolutely
hopeless spot in the market ( this happens sometimes if you are a casual stallholder and it is something we just have to put up with ).  It was really disappointing because it
certainly decreased our expected sales.
After the market we went for a look at the temple.. It is truly astounding to see this in a little Australian seaside town.  There was what we presumed was an older temple further down the road but it had been abandoned and vandalised as you can see here.

Coffs Harbour market tomorrow and then further North.  Will we go to Nimbin ? Broadbeach ? Jimboomba ? Nerang? Surfers Paradise?  Decisions, decisions…