The Steamtug Blog

As you will recall from my last post, we had a “mates” get together at Sovereign Hill. During this event, Murray took me aside and asked what we should do for Charlie’s birthday. You see, Charlie had a birthday recently and had talked about a big party, but since his Dad got sick just before, and his daughter had her 21st birthday just after, poor Charlie’s birthday kind of slippd unenthusiastically into the too hard basket.

“We have to do something, or it will pass with the loss for an excuse for a party!” said Murray.  “See what you can arrange.” So after a little thinking, and checking my work schedule, I found the next weekend was free for me, but I was busy for the following few weekends. So it had to be the following weekend. By co-incidence, it also happened to be my birthday that I didn’t want anyone to know about, so I could just invite a few of my friends along with our mutual mates, and Charlie could invite his friends too. So it ended up being around 35 people.

The original plan was to have the party at “Goofa’s” place. As he is a batchelor, we could trash the place and leave, and it would probably look better than when we arrived. But how do I get all the beer over there? So I came up with a plan, which was an experiment for our beer supply for the Bathurst Car races coming up in October. I got my small wheelie bin, put a beer keg inside with a few bags of ice (we Aussie’s can’t drink out beer warm… even in Winter) and hooked up a beer tap on the end of the hose. (We call it a “pluto gun”) So we had draught beer out of the keg on the aft deck of the house by the fire on a cold winters night.

I was quite chirpie by the end of the night, probably because I was enjoying the beer so much, I forgot to eat anything! Then it came time to sing “Hippo Birdy” to Charlie, but they all knew it was my birthday too! I got a few nice bottles of scotch, amoung other things….

So HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHARLIE! Looking forward to drinking beer with you from a rubbish bin at Bathurst in a few weeks time. 🙂