Robot Claw

Today I visited the 2022 Newcastle Stamp & Coin Show.

By a stroke of luck when I was at a post office the other day the clerk mentioned the show and given the venue is walkable from mums I of course had to go.

Entry was free and the event was held in a very large hall with the two dozen or so booths reasonably well spaced out. I’d say they were about 60% stamp dealers, 30% coin/currency dealers and 10% supplies.

There were also hundreds of ‘panels’ showcasing articles on various stamp related topics and themes, many of which seemed to be written by club members. I particularly enjoyed a lengthy history (with examples) on depictions of dragons on stamps.

Dealers ranged from those selling inexpensive international stamps to a few selling high end pieces for serious collectors (the most expensive single stamp I saw was A$8900). I was very pleasantly surprised to find a few selling mint unused (Australian) stamps and I invested heavily: watch your postcards for examples of some of these!

The coin/currency dealers were bittersweet. On one hand it was astonishing seeing all the various limited designs of the $1 and $2 coins, but on the other hand they were so pricey! The cheapest I saw the brand new ‘tooth fairy’ $2 was $15! That’s too expensive for me so I’ll hope mum gets that in her change one day and passes it on.

Some individual examples of the coins were incredibly expensive, and I couldn’t determine why. For instance I saw one honey bee $2 coin priced at $185, and it didn’t even seem to be graded. I pondered this briefly and walked on.

Rolled Australian coins of all denominations were available at several sellers, often at a premium. I regretted not asking the price of a roll of old 1c coins. but the stall was busy and the other customers seemed serious.

A multitude of pre-polymer Australian currency was available, and I purchased a few. It was nostalgic seeing the old $100 notes; if I ever received one of them as a child then I felt rich indeed! (For the non-Australians, the country switched from paper to polymer notes in 1992.)

I even saw bundles of every type of pre-polymer note, but the above brick (1000 old $1 notes) was the most astonishing. It wasn’t priced but I believe I overheard the dealer tell someone it was $4000.

I’ll end with two more items that caught my eye. The first was the above sheet of 55 beautiful Japanese stamps issued in 2020 to commemorate ‘international letter writing week‘.

The other was phone cards! Several sellers had them, and I saw examples from Australia, Japan and Europe. One guy explained to me that for a brief while they had been popular with the same people that collect stamps, but now ‘no one wants them’!

I stayed for about 2.5 hours, but even though I was well masked I began to get a bit uncomfortable when the (almost entirely unmasked) crowd thickened so I legged it out of there just before lunchtime.

It was time to order another bold and unusual burger from a fast food joint… but you can read about that one tomorrow 🙂

Sue picked me up today and we went to Belmont Lagoon:

This is a lagoon nestled between Lake Macquarie and the ocean, which has a rich history from ancient times (aboriginal heritage describes the lagoon as being formed from the tears of the weeping moon) through the late 1880s (when the area was heavily mined) and into WW2 (when an antitank wall allowed seawater to enter the previously freshwater lagoon). Now the area is mostly wild, and today it was very quiet and as you can see the water was still. We saw crabs and little fish in the waters, but no other wildlife.

We then headed over to Caves Beach for a bit if spelunking! Sue had planned well, and the tide was out so were able to enter all the scary caves…

…from which we thankfully emerged unscathed 😉

As you can see the weather was lovely today, and writing this several hours later I think I may have even got a bit sunburned.

We also had a quick stop at Redhead beach. This is a location where I almost perished many times as a child, tossed and turned by the merciless waves and attacked by wild jellyfish and rabid dogs. Australia in the 70s and 80s knew how to turn boys into men!

Oh and I’ve already sent loads of these, so watch your mailboxes 🙂

I went shopping for a while yesterday to the local mall, and things seemed fairly pre-Covid to me. Australia seems to have moved on more than the USA, and mask wearing is almost nonexistent. I’m still wearing mine, if only because I don’t want to risk catching it before I return!

The weather was beautiful, and the walk home from the mall was actually quite warm. Even so the Australians still talk about the cold, and it’s amusing how I seem to have adjusted to real cold compared to the brisk temperatures they find uncomfortable here 🙂

And then today, I went to visit Adam for some card flopping!

We played 12 games in total, using 4 decks each made from cards from two sets (Jumpstart and Crimson Vow). This was about 6 hours of Magic, and we’ve still got more packs to open, decks to build and games to play!

As usual Adam won virtually every game (he’s like a Magic AI) but it was great playing the game for the first time in years and catching up, and I’m already looking forward to our next games next week.

It was also relaxing to have a day where I didn’t walk 20,000 steps! It’s not as easy now as when I was a stripling 🙂

Yesterday Sue an I woke early like roosters, and decided to walk over the same bridge that we had climbed the day prior! We wanted to do it for its own sake, and to visit a secret garden hidden just over the other side.

To get there we walked along the harbour walk that winds past Barangaroo, the new casino-that-isn’t-yet-a-casino. The weather was lovely and the new foreshore development was great and I’ll almost certainly do this walk almost every time I visit from now on. It led right to the bridge, over which we then strolled!

That’s the view looking back from the northwest side, and you can see Luna Park on the left. It may look cold and menacing, but it was actually quite comfortable. Right behind us from where this photo was taken was Wendy’s Secret Garden, which is an eccentric fairytale garden designed and built over many years by a Sydney artist.

After the return to the CBD and lunch it was time to head to Newcastle and mum’s, and the long-awaited reunion:

Dinner was meat pies followed by a Toobs binge:

You can bet this won’t be the first bag of Toobs I’ll be inhaling this trip 🙂

Sue came down to Sydney today and surprised me with a belated birthday gift: we were climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge!

The entire endeavour took just over 3.5 hours including about an hour of setup and safety training. We had to strip to our underwear before donning full body climb suits, a safety harness, two hats, a radio, rain pants and a rain coat. We were part of a group of 14, and by request we were at the front of the line (since I knew I’d have a lot of questions).

We couldn’t bring anything with us which meant no phone, so I grabbed the above pic from the internet just to show scale. At all times you are connected to a rail that would catch you if you fell, and every action is rehearsed in a ‘simulator’ even before you start the climb.

The views from the very top were of course breathtaking (that’s another pic from the net above) but even underneath (the road) or inside the main structure there was lots to see including the harbour about 450 feet below.

There’s me at the top to prove I did it! I loved everything about the climb and highly recommend it if you’re ever in town.