A trip back in time

The last day of our very pleasant holiday, and a fairly easy schedule. It was a 90 minute drive to our destination, the Tocal historic homestead. Our guide, Phil, who met us there was very knowledgeable and gave us an hour-long talk about the many twists and turns in the property’s formation and ownership. Suffice to say, its history dates back to the 1830s.

It’s a beautiful property, often used nowadays for weddings and other such gatherings. Many of the surrounding trees are over 200 years old, and there is one specimen which is an estimated 500 years old.

After Phil’s talk he took us on a guided tour of the surrounding buildings. The main house, while looking impressive from the outside is apparently quite small and uninteresting inside. Unfortunately some major maintenance work was taking place inside so we were unable to see the interior for ourselves. The surrounding buildings - barn, hay loft, bull pens and so on - were interesting in themselves, so we didn’t feel at all short-changed.

From there it was a short ten minute drive to the adjacent Tocal Agricultural college, originally part of the Tocal estate, where we were served lunch. From there, Gabe, our excellent and very personable coach driver for the entire trip, delivered us to Newcastle Airport in good time for our 3.30pm scheduled flight. Up till then our entire trip had been going swimmingly, maybe too good to be true. Departure time came and went, with the scheduled time pushed back by 4.5 hours due to an engineering problem with our aircraft. Fortunately Newcastle has a modern comfortable terminal, so there were plenty of food choices for dinner. Between chatting to my fellow Probus travellers and catching up with reading the time passed reasonably quickly. All the same, it was good to finally land in Brisbane where Helen very kindly was waiting to collect me.Read more