Beautiful Armidale (long with pictures)

I was lucky this weekend, it started on Thursday.

As volunteer editor of a newsletter about alpacas, I have recently put together and sent out a calendar of cute pictures and regional dates with the approval for committee and members (no easy feat as anyone involved with committees will tell you). So I spent Thursday in my car, driving from Sydney to Armidale (600+ kilometres) for a regional meeting and popping into Information Centre and little shops along the way, trying to sell the calendar. I got rid of 50 or so. I also stopped and interviewed a fleece testing owner for the newsletter.

I arrived at the little B&B I was staying in just after 6pm, order a take away and a bottle of red and chilled out ‘cause I was (quite frankly) knackered after a day in the car.


I awoke on Friday feeling good, and was looking forward to a day amongst the alpacas, blue fairy wrens and plovers, English cottage garden, writing up the interview and generally taking it easy in preparation for the Committee/OGM meetings to be attended on Sunday. At about 12.30/1 I decided to pick up my messages, what a mistake! The last one of five was from the regional president telling ‘we’ll sort out the Carnation* issue at the Committee meeting’.

Well, with a cryptic message like that I had to call her and find out what was happening. After all I didn’t have access to my email in the wilds of downtown Armidale.

It turns out that Carnation had once again been up to her trick of being vindictive, mean spirited and noxious self to the point of recruiting a Crony to attack me, the committee and the calendar by saying such things as the photos were poorly composed and taken on a cheap camera (my camera was not cheap, small, but not cheap), that 85% of the pictures had been taken in one spot (at least 10 different locations including overseas), the animals portrayed were miserable looking and genetically poor (10 of the 13 months are of broad ribbon winners), the advertisers should get their money back (it was sponsorship, not advertising), major events in the general alpaca calendar were missing (not available at time of publication, and still not available) and finally that the calendar as a whole was a ‘disaster’.

As you can image after hearing this and other tip bits that I have not included I was rather P*SSed Off! The President was also miffed as her animals were some that had been accused of being genetically inferior, including her Supreme Champion female. I can quite honestly say, if I had seen Carnation or Crony at that moment I would have nutted her. My leisurely day was out the window.

Many phone calls were made to the sponsors and all but one, were happy with what they got. Carnation and Crony had, btw, not been involved in production at all. Much discussion took place, with my hosts, (also alpaca breeders, who incidentally thought the tone of the emails were personal attacks), and I was calmed down. My weekend on a whole though had a taint on it. After dinner and a few glasses of red, things were looking better, but I still went to bed muttering ‘bastards’ under my cab sav breath.

Saturday, say hubby and I doing a rather long, delightful tourist drive to see the waterfalls of the New England Tablelands. Bakers Falls was rocky and dry. Wollomombi Falls, according to the postcard I purchased is supposed to be a rushing torrent forming the tallest waterfall in NSW, it was dry. The surrounding landscape was spectacular so that kinda made up for the lack of water. Lunch at the Wollomombi General store saw hubby eating the biggest burger on the planet and me selling the owner 5 calendars.

Further on up the road was Ebor Falls, now this one is perennial, so it had water. And boy, was it purdy! One waterfall made up on an upper and lower falls. The Upper falls was wide with lots of rocks for the water to divide and break over. The water then wound its way to the lower fall which is a sheer 100 metre drop to the bottom of the valley. The drive back to the B&B took us onto dirt roads, past sweeping plains and amongst many iddy bidy baby moo cows.

Saturday night we had dinner with the committee and discussed all sorts of things at length, including the calendar, and pretty much decide that Carnation and Crony could take a runny jump and that we were not going to let them get to us (mainly me ;-) Nice dinner/bbq, good company and a dash of good drink.

Sunday and the day of the Alpaca meeting, 32 mad keen people in attendance. Pretty much all of them said how much they liked the calendar; in fact I sold 40 at the meeting. So, in my general business of this blog entry I would like to say, 'get you’re your bloody facts right, Carnation and Crony!’

On the drive home, hubby and I were so engrossed in our discussion of volunteer organisations and need for people on the side lines to criticise and put down those that help, he got caught speeding by a nice policeman in a red car. The Copper gave us a ticket for going 123kms in a 100 limit, we gave him a calendar.

*name changed to protect the Cantankerous Old Bat.

(898 words)