Well I did say I would tell you about the Rural Women's Gathering. It was held in Coonamble and over 450 women from all over NSW attended to attend talks, workshops and garden tours. From what I understand it's been going for around 15 years and it's an opportunity for rural women to get together to learn new skills (both for their worklife and hobbies) and network with other women and perhaps form friendships.
I have to admit I think the committee were a little overwhelmed by the volume of work needed to host an event with that many participants but it was a good experience overall.
The paperwork said that the accomodation in town was booked out but they would have "luxury tents" with an amenities block available. Well I haven't been camping (by choice) for a lot of years but I think I can tell the difference between luxury and not (this was definitely not). The camp bed was quite narrow and the mattress was 2cm thick, now I understand it would have been difficult to come up with the required amount of tents but they could have at least advised people to bring an air mattress or extra doona to sleep on if thats all they could access.
So now I come to the amenities block. In my mind I imagined something like a caravan park might have, but no, these amenities came trucked in on the back of a semi trailer which you then had to access by walking up a set of lightweight aluminium stairs. They were made out of a converted shipping container and they had 2 for showers (containing 8 showers in each) and 2 for toilets. The good thing with the showers was the water was hot but the bad thing was they were so small you had trouble protecting your modesty. You had to leave your clothes on a hook outside the shower stall, have a shower (trying to keep the shower curtain from wrapping itself around you) reach out to get your towel, dry off and then decide whether you wanted to attempt dressing yourself in a confined wet space or go out into the walkway and dress quickly while trying not to "flash" somebody. We had Sarah with us who is 21 and she tells me she's seen enough naked 60yr olds to last her a lifetime.
Now the toilets were delightful (sarcasm intended). They should have been OK but the trick was working out how to flush them. For those of you like myself who have never seen these type they have a lever (a bit like the peddle rubbish bins) that is attached to the base of the toilet that you depress with your heel, very firmly. However a lot of women evidently found this too difficult and you would find when you went to go it hadn't been flushed so we first of all tried to avoid using these toilets where possible but if need be we would flush the toilet and move onto the next one, our theory being that it would hopefully eliminate some of the smell.
I did feel sorry for some of the older women attending because I had to be careful when walking up or down the stairs and I'm fairly agile so for some it would have been difficult.
However, I met some lovely ladies and I had the opportunity to take some products and showcase my business so that was the good part of the weekend.
