Slumming it in Sawtell

I decided to take the girls to Sawtell because I love it and I hoped neither of them had been there. I was right.  Besides the beautiful trees in the main street, I particularly love the old cinema there.  I was most upset to hear a while ago that it had closed down.  We were already booked to stay on the Friday night at the Hotel Sawtell when I stumbled across an article on the internet about the theatre being saved and reopened due to a campaign headed by David Stratton, and now operating as an arthouse cinema.  Right, I thought, we'll go to a movie after dinner.

First, though, I had to show the girls the sea, so we drove straight to Bonville Head to complete our journey from the mountains to the coast.  It was beautiful up there and the surfers were out in force.

Then we cruised down First Avenue and the girls gasped at the trees, while I gasped at the  demolition sign on the cinema.  No movies for us tonight.

We parked out the front of the hotel and I booked in; was given the key to room 7, then left to find it myself.  I covered the entire top floor from front to back three times without success, then had to front up to the bar to admit defeat.  I was taken out onto the front verandah and shown a door with no number anywhere near it!  It was a simple room with three beds and no air conditioning.

I went back to the car, drove to the carpark at the back (where we could access the back stairs), only to find it full.  We ended up on the other side of the street in the grocery store carpark, having to haul our now-very-heavy luggage across the road through the restaurant, up the very steep main stairs (marked 'only use in emergency') into our room.  
 
We inspected the facilities: NO fridge anywhere. The common area consisted of a table in the hall equipped with an electric jug, cardboard cups, wooden stirrers and four bottles containing tea, coffee, sugar and UHT milk.  The jug would not fit under the tap in the sink in the Ladies' (way down the end of the hall), so you either used a cardboard cup to fill it, or the tap in the bath.  It was in this bath that I also washed up the dirty dishes from our picnic lunch, as there was no plug for the sink.  The bath itself had no shower curtain, so when you showered there, at one end of a long bathroom, you felt weirdly exposed.  We later solved the problem of keeping our goodies cold in the esky, by begging the bartender for some ice.  We dumped the contents of the icebucket into a plastic bag and that lasted long enough.  The interesting fact is that this accommodation cost us exactly $14 less than the magnificent apartment in Warwick.  What a difference being a seaside resort makes.  
 
At least we were in a convenient spot: directly over the road from the mighty Sawtell RSL.  From our verandah, its lights beckoned so over we went for a drink and dinner.  When we finally found a way to get in, we discovered the place was chockers. It was, of course, Friday night: meat tray night!  We put off ordering food till the raffles were drawn, hoping the crowd would thin out, then settled back to watch the spectacle.  Over against one wall was the largest collection of meat trays any of us had ever seen.  It looked like the meat section of a supermarket.  They started calling out numbers and flashing them up onto screens really quickly, and then we noticed that everyone had long rolls of paper with many numbers on them.  We befriended the man at the next table who told us that you received six numbers for a dollar.  He had invested $30 so had 180 numbers.  By the end of the draw, he had five meat trays. 'Last week I won nine', he said.  This is how the pensioners of Sawtell feed themselves.  I guess the Sawtell butcher does OK too.
We eventually managed to order and eat dinner, and found out next day via facebook that one of Jan's friends was actually in the same room at the same time, but neither spotted the other in the large crowd.

Next morning, we had breakfast at a coffee shop down the road, then popped into the Anglican op shop next door.  It may have been small, but in there I hit pay dirt.  I not only found another important part of my 4WD club Christmas party costume, but the frypan I had long been searching for. A couple of months ago, the handle fell off my favourite medium-sized frypan and I had been trying to find the perfect replacement ever since.  This one had never been used and still had the label stuck to the back.  They also had several plates from a '70s set that I used to own, but as I had disposed of mine, I wasn't tempted to buy them.
 
While the girls were trying on clothes, I popped down to look at the old cinema. It turns out that the demolition notice referred to the interior only, and that they are keeping the outside, building apartments above it, but there will still be a cinema inside. I may get there yet, some day.

Back to the hotel we went, where I had now moved the car outside the dungeon doorway, which was the exit when you used the back stairs.  The dungeon consisted of a cellar which doubled as the laundry. There was a poor woman working in there as I came past earlier.  To get outside you passed the dungeon, then went up three stairs to street level.  What a claustrophobic workplace!

We loaded up the car, but not before I had left my mark.  The fire evacuation signs all over the hotel were in need of a wee bit of correction. I only fixed the ones in the common area, not in our room, so they wouldn't know who to blame!