Moving on

All good things come to and end; living the good life at Somerset Rise Palace ended today.

After packing the bags and having the general factotum, aka The Mahjong Queen, carry them out to the Royal Red Wagon, I took one last look about for the inevitable possession that missed the pack. 

Well drugged up – legal painkillers, of course - I sit in the passenger seat; the MahJong Queen decked out in her chauffeur's livery starts the motor and we cruise away on the next leg of my recovery phrase.  Today we are off to that regional city best known as Shepp. There, over the next ten days, my every need will be attended to by MyVeryBestFriendCarmel.  Or at least, this is what I am hoping for; this is the plan.

The sky promises rain and a few showers come our way before we arrive in Benalla.  We agree Benalla would be a good place for a coffee stop and to my surprise we don’t turn towards the main street but pull off the highway near a service station.  Parked to one side of the service station is a mobile coffee cart – there goes any idea I might have had about having coffee and cake while sitting at a table.

We talk for a few minutes with the coffee vendor; she took over the running of this coffee cart and found she had a lot to learn about running a mobile café and even more to learn about making cups of coffee that kept customers returning.  After an initial down turn in trade she spent some time and money learning the basics of coffee making and slowly but surely the coffee cart fortunes turned around.

As we arrived on the outskirt of Shepp the MJQ talked about an article she had read about a new food venture in town selling local produce. We also talked about a café which serves Thai food, the one which I always refer to as the Straw Bale.    

MVBFC had a light lunch waiting for us and it was not too long before the MJQ was on her way back to the Capital of the North-east, MVBFC was driving down town to meet friends for afternoon tea and I was sound asleep in bed.