RSL Tanunda Christmas Lunch and AGM

The Hut set up for Christmas Lunch

Both Christina and I were heavily involved in organising and running the Returned Services League (RSL) Christmas Lunch and Annual General meeting for 2019.

Christina is treasurer and I was acting in the secretary's position while she was on holidays overseas. 

Fortunately, we have a group of volunteers who all contributed to setting up tables, cutlery, glass wear, decorations etc and cleaning up afterwards so that we could hold our brief Annual General Meeting.

Meals were provided by local caterers 

Christina, as Treasurer, sat at the entrance to The Hut and collected meal fees and membership renewals. As usual, she does a top job of everything she handles and everything went off like a Swiss watch.

Each table had a bottle of red and white wine and judging by the number of bottles I took to the recycling bin afterwards, nobody held back.

Our bar has prices that are unmatched with local restaurants and bars so a quantity of beer, spirits and soft drinks was consumed too.

You can have a few drinks at the RSL Tanunda Hut without having to get a second mortgage on your house (assuming you have a mortgage).

Living in the middle of one of Australia's major wine producing regions has been an eye-opener in seeing how many people drink wine and how much of it is consumed. 

It's not unusual to see a gossip of attractive young ladies sitting at one of the alfresco wine bars having a midday tipple of Barossa wine. I guess having spent so many years living with the prohibition in the Northern Territory, I'm not accustomed to seeing people drinking at midday.

Apparently, until fairly recently, workers in vineyards were permitted to drink as much of the wonderful nectar they could. Then Occupational Health and Safety improved and the generous practice disappeared in the dustbin of history. Can you imagine how many inebriated workers must have driven home? Can you imagine how many damaged livers there must have been?

Shortly, our RSL Club stands down for the Christmas-New Year period and we;ll be back in action in mid-January.

Robin

Why are there no photos?

Unfortunately, the satellite internet on the Sapphire Princess doesn't have sufficient grunt to handle large density images. Since I don't have access to my usual range of image editing software, I'm unable to thin them out, so I will place appropriate images with posts when I have better internet access.

Robin

Piraeus, Greece

We'd never visited Greece, so we were looking forward to docking at Piraeus, the port of Athlens which we did around 0700 hrs.

With so much to see and so little time (I call these visits sheep dip tours) we signed up for a hop-on-hop-off bus and did a visual of some parts of the city with a long stop at the Acropolis.

As there were three ships visiting, there were far too many tourists. We were bumping  into each other on stairways and trying to take a photo without someone walking in front of you was a challenge. I'm a bit of an impatient old bugger who hates queues and doesn't do crowds well, so it wasn't my best day.

The architecture and engineering is amazing given the era. Huge heavy plinths have been raised and installed above stanchions with great precision. And what magic enabled the craftsmen to create hard marble stanchions that are perfectly cylindrical with series of evenly spaced symmetrical gougings throughout their length?

I'm sure there is much more to the human story than historians know or have revealed to us.

It always bothered me in Egypt that of all the hieroglyphs, there is not one schematic diagram with measurements and mathematical calculations although both would have been critical. I wonder whether the artefacts were built by a much earlier race of extraterrestrials or advanced human beings and later peoples added the hieroglyphs. We'll probably never know.

What we do know is that they must have been stunning before time and the elements degraded them.

Robin
Off to Valletta, Malta