We sat on the balcony of our hotel room in the late afternoon as the temperature dropped and the Court House clock tower struck the hours, and smoked a cigar while the sun went down and the voluptuous Moon rose slowly and gracefully into the sky over Wagga Wagga. (Well, I smoked a cigar. Laetita kept me company.)
It was a beautiful evening, and the Moon was particularly grand, for it was a Supermoon, as a spokesman from NASA explained on the on the news that night – as close as that satellite would be to the Earth all year, and perhaps for many years – the coincidence of fullness and closeness making it seem all the larger.
If it sounds a bit like I’m out of my depth describing astronomical phenomena, that’s because I am. It was an amazing sight: that’s all it’s really possible to say with any authority.
Wagga is a very pretty country town in the Riverina district close to the border between New South Wales and Victoria. It gets cold in winter and hot in summer and the overnight temperature fell to around -1 degrees Celsius.
The quick trip we did was a fun little jaunt with many hours of driving and an unexpectedly good meal at the hotel, then a visit to a haunted house, or a house reputed to be haunted (by as many as ten ghosts), the next day on our way back to Sydney. The house is called Monte Cristo, in the town of Junee, and although we didn’t really encounter anything scary, an unexplained noise or two aside, it was worth it to look through the rooms of a refurbished mansion full of antique furniture and other antique items from the time when it was built by the family who first lived there.
These things are worth doing, and I’m so glad we did them. Leatitia and I had a great couple of days away, as part of our Honeymoon, which we’ve decided to spend mostly at home with the pets.
Johan Turdenmeier's Miscellany 