I’m writing this on a borrowed netbook from Des and Deb’s house. It’s now started raining after threatening to do so for a few hours. The temperature has dropped a bit but not too much. Hopefully the night won’t be too warm.

The train ride was long – I’d forgotten how far out Katoomba is. It would have been a hot and boring ride and I would have been exhausted by the time I got here. As it was, I didn’t arrive until 3pm so that’s about an hour on the train, I think (although I wasn’t paying too much attention – merely trying not to wilt in the heat of the vestibule area where I was mostly trapped with the bike as people needed to move in and out of the carriage).

It was an all-stations trip; maybe there’s through-trains I could catch if I needed to do this regularly. Given the amount of time I had to wait on the station, it’s obvious that knowing the timetable is a necessity for car-less mountain dwellers.

The house is big and sprawly. There’s another guest – Nina, the daughter of a friend from Lismore – who is staying in Des’s office which has been remade into a bedroom. Deb has her own office on the other side of the living room. The master bedroom has an enormous walk-in closet , and the kitchen has a walk-in pantry that shames the one at Wilson’s Creek.

I’m staying in a guest bedroom on the other side of the house, past a massive second living room that is all glass in one side, and then past a little work area/junk room.

There’s a self-contained single bedroom bungalow down the back of the yard, and a garden with about 10 raised beds that have been producing lots of vegetables. From the front, the house looks like an ordinary suburban place, but it is a bit TARDIS-like once you’re inside.

I have no plans for tomorrow. I was going to drop into Summit Gear to see what their bike panniers look like in person, but they’re right opposite the station so I dropped in today. Unfortunately they’re out of stock of the large ones, so I might have to come back in a month or so.