With the stresses of Sandra’s death and the “Thirst” filming adventure now behind us Nett and I settled down to make the most of our retirement years. We had a good home that we loved and, thanks to Sandra’s inheritance, we were now in a comfortable financial situation. There was much of the world we wanted to see so we looked out for suitable trips. We also had our caravan and there was much of Australia that we still wanted to explore. We were both then in good health and wanted to travel as much as possible.
So, quite a bit of this chapter is taken up with the many trips that we took in the years from 2010 onwards. This may all read like a mad whirl of non-stop travel. In fact all the trips we took were spread over several years and we took good care not to over-stretch ourselves. We gave ourselves plenty of time for bridge, book club, yoga, theatre, movies, volunteer work and other more leisurely activities at home between trips away.
Before any of this, however, Nett’s 70th birthday came up. Peter and Yvette booked us into a boutique hotel in the city and took us to the world famous two-hat Japanese restaurant, Tetsuya’s, for dinner. What a wonderful present for Nett! (They did a similar thing for my 70th birthday a few months later).
To make the most of our good health, Nett embarked on a rigorous fitness program. She enrolled on a week-long “On Track” fitness camp based in Leura. To her dismay she found that her instructors and all the other participants were much younger than she was, so it was very hard going! Nevertheless she continued to keep up her fitness afterwards. This included sessions with a personal trainer and joining a local gym, Curves. As a result of all this, in August of that year, she was able to walk the 14km City to Surf in just over three hours! This was a good test not only of Nett’s fitness but also of the foot surgery that she’d had a few years earlier. We did this walk together as part of a charity drive for Amnesty International for whom Nett had worked as a volunteer back in 2002.
Then came a wide-ranging Western Australia holiday. Fil and Harriet joined us from Canada in September. We started with a flight to Broome.
From there we took an outback bus tour of the Kimberleys (“The Bungle Bungles Tour”). This turned out to be a bit rugged for us septuagenarians as we found ourselves sleeping in tents throughout the trip! Nevertheless it was still a marvellous and unusual excursion for all of us. There were so many amazing sights to see, particularly the spectacular Bungle Bungles.
After this the four of us flew down to Perth and then drove from there to Margaret River. The main feature for us there was to be able to check out the local wineries! Then we drove back to Perth and spent a few days there. We particularly loved the huge Kings Park with its variety of unique fauna. From Perth Fil and Harriet flew back to Sydney while we opted for a more leisurely return home on the Indian Pacific train. Nett loved train travel so this was definitely the way we wanted to go!
In February the following year (2011) we made a caravan trip to Sawpit Creek, in the Snowies. On the way there we called in to lay flowers at Nett’s Pop and Nanna’s grave at Nowra Cemetery.
At Sawpit Creek we camped near the cabins where we had stayed with our boys back in 1984. One thing I remember from an otherwise uneventful trip was receiving some alarming news from my cousin Liz Garson in Christchurch. A really bad earthquake had struck there, causing a number of fatalities. Fortunately she was unharmed.
Then, in May, came the first of three wonderful overseas trips that we were able to undertake in the next few years. We booked a European river cruise going down the Reine and Danube rivers from Amsterdam to Budapest. Having studied European history as part of her Arts course there was much of interest for Nett in this trip. Before joining the start of the cruise we stopped over in the UK to make a short visit to my 93 year old father and stepmother in Hartest, Suffolk. We then spent a few days in Dublin, a side-tour that was unfortunately restricted by a very heavy cold on my part. From Amsterdam the cruise itself, aboard the river cruise ship AmaDante was magical as we saw so much of Europe’s great historical cities along these major rivers. To our surprise nearly all of our fellow tourists were Australian as the APT cruise had been booked there!
On board we dined most enjoyably on local regions’ cuisine and wine throughout. We stopped daily at many riverside towns.
After a while Nett found the repetition of old German towns somewhat boring, so she elected to skip one of them to relax on the ship! On the Danube we stopped at Vienna.
Then, at Bratislava, we were greatly amused to see this unusually grim election poster!
After disembarking at Budapest we went by bus to Prague and spent three days in that city.
We then flew home from there with a stopover in Bangkok en route.
This was a wonderful trip, one which we found to be thoroughly interesting and relaxing. But in the end we were glad to be able to get home and rest up!
Then, on the 4th of August that year came a wonderful event. Peter and Yvette presented us with a grandson, Leo Michael Danckwerts. We both felt so thrilled and blessed to have been joined by this newcomer to our family. Naturally we visited him often!
Another forgettable caravan trip followed in October, this one to Burrinjuck Dam, near Yass. We stopped off in Canberra on the way home to visit the annual Floriade festival, unfortunately spoilt for us by heavy rain! Then, back in Sydney, we attended a very moving concert at the Opera House later that month. This was Nigel Westlake’s tribute to his late son: “Missa Solis: Requiem for Eli”.
After Christmas at home with Peter, Yvette and baby Leo, Nett hosted a family gathering on Boxing Day. She was not normally into entertaining in a big way. However this was one event that she really loved to put on to bring together as many family members as possible, not to mention the opportunity to show off her new grandson on this occasion!
The next year (2012) started with a couple of medical issues for Nett. First there was an emergency admission to the local San hospital with sudden chest pains. This was unresolved but the fact she also had a hiatus hernia was picked up at this time. Then a persistent sinus infection that she’d endured for years had to be cleared up. This involved a saline washout of her sinuses (“antral lavage“) by a surgeon. This was successful, not only in getting rid of Nett’s sinus infection, but also clearing up the occasional bouts of tinnitus that had been troubling her for some years.
Then came a major Carter family event. A distant cousin of Nett’s, Byron Carter, had been doing extensive work on Carter genealogy, starting with the two original Carter brothers who had emigrated from Send, in Surrey, in the early 1800s. These two, and their male descendants, had been prolific breeders! The result was that there were a large number Carter relatives scattered around Australia. A gathering of the clan was organised in May in Yass. Nett and I attended, along with Brian and Fran. There were many cousins for Nett to catch up with, including Patsy and Betsy whom she had known as a child from her Junee days.
There was also a moving visit to the presumed burial site of Nett’s great grandmother, Mary Ann Leonard. She had been an Irish potato famine emigrant who had died in extreme poverty at the age of 34 after giving birth to eight children.
The last of Mary Ann’s children was Nett’s grandfather, George Carter, who is mentioned in Nett’s earlier chapter on My Dad.
Our next holiday the following month continued Nett’s love affair with train travel. This time we took the Ghan train, which ran between Adelaide and Darwin. We flew to Adelaide early so that we could visit the zoo there to see the two giant pandas that they had recently acquired from China. These were fascinating creatures, well worth the extra time we took to see them.
Then we boarded the Ghan train and headed north.
After two days of mainly desert country we stopped at Alice Springs. We broke our journey there to take a bus tour to Uluru where we stayed a couple of nights.
The Rock itself was a magnificent spectacle. It went through a whole range of colour changes at different times of the day.
We also had a dinner event under the stars where a large telescope was on hand. This gave us a great view through extremely clear skies of the planet Saturn with its awesome rings. Another bus then took us to Kings Canyon National Park where we went for long hikes around this spectacular place. Then it was back to Alice and onto the Ghan train resuming our northward journey. We had a stopover in Katherine for a river cruise and our first close-up glimpse of big crocodiles in the wild. Then back on the train and on to Darwin. There we went out to tour the Litchfield National Park before a couple of night-time events: the Mindil Beach Sunset Market and an open air cinema.
We spent three days in Darwin before flying back to Sydney. Amazingly, despite all that we’d heard, we never saw a single cane toad throughout our trip!
After a four month break we took our caravan for what eventually turned out to be its last outing. This took us to Grabine Lakeside State Park, near Crookwell. We were now finding that caravan trips were getting to be more uncomfortable for our ageing bodies and also less interesting than all our other trips that we were taking to more exotic locations.
Our next travel adventure in the summer that followed was a case in point, taking us as it did to Tasmania. There we stayed in Hobart to see the amazing MONA art museum with so many unusual and often confronting artworks. We also strolled through the huge Salamanca Market. We hired a car and drove up to the top of Mount Wellington where it was a surprisingly chilly four degrees! Then we made the long drive out to Cradle Mountain National Park. We drove to Dove Lake and walked around the wonderful scenery surrounding it. Cradle Mountain itself made a spectacular backdrop.
Another highlight was visiting a mini-zoo featuring the endangered Tasmanian Devils and other native animals.
Then we drove to Launceston and returned our hire car there before flying home to Sydney.
The following year, 2013, we found our ideal cruise trip which took in so many places in Europe that we wanted to see, particularly those around the Baltic Sea. This was the “grand tour” of our retirement years, travelling on the Holland America cruise liner “MS Eurodam“.
This tour took in ten countries and fourteen shore trips. The countries that we visited (with the stops at each) were, in order: Italy (Rome: no time for sightseeing!), Spain/Portugal (Cartagena, Malaga/Alhambra, Cadiz/Jerez, Lisbon and Vigo/Santiago de Compostela), Guernsey (St Peter Port), Belgium (Zeebrugge), Denmark (Copenhagen), Sweden (Stockholm), Estonia (Tallinn), Russia (St Petersburg), Finland (Helsinki) and Germany (Warnemunde/Berlin and Kiel/Hamburg). There were shore trips at each place. The ship then returned to Copenhagen where we disembarked.
What were Nett’s favourite memories from this cruise? Top of the list has to be the two hour guided tour we were able to take of the fabulous Hermitage Museum at St Petersburg with its treasures from all over Europe. Nett found this absolutely stunning in its magnificent opulence and she could have stayed there forever!.
But there were also many other highlights of the trip, both before and after this. In Santiago de Compostela, the end point of the famous “Camino” or “Pilgrim’s Walk”, the cathedral there was just fascinating. St Peter Port in Guernsey was low-key and quaintly English, which we loved. In Copenhagen Nett photographed me in front of the famous Mermaid statue.
In Stockholm we visited the famous Vasa Museum (where Nett bought me a miniature ship-in-a-bottle which I still have at home). We also visited the unique subzero-temperature Ice Bar where the drinking vessels are made of ice!
Then there were the lovely old streets and turreted buildings in Tallinn’s Old Town where Nett did some shopping for children’s clothes for Leo.
From Warnemunde we travelled by private train to an excellent guided tour of Berlin where we saw all the usual things: Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, etc.
And, back in Copenhagen, the Tivoli Gardens were really lovely, with its wonderful range of fairground attractions.
But there was so much more that we remembered fondly from that time. After three days in Copenhagen it was time to return home. It had been an arduous but very worthwhile trip. We did not particularly like shipboard life in itself, but that was more than compensated for by the many great shore excursions that we’d been able to enjoy and the convenience of not having to pack and unpack all the time.
Back home Nett was able to enjoy one of the great entertainment highlights of her life, going to a live Leonard Cohen performance at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. She’d always been a huge fan of this man, and she sat absolutely spellbound as he rolled out his magic on the stage! At the end of his performance she jumped to her feet to join in the standing ovation and grabbed my arm to haul me to my feet to join in! What a wonderful evening this was for her!
There were more medical issues for Nett with a facial basal carcinoma having to be excised. This was successful. Then in March the following year (2014) she underwent surgery to correct for the hiatus hernia that had been detected a couple of years earlier. She had been plagued by gastric reflux problems in recent years. This operation was only partially successful as her gastric reflux still recurred occasionally.
Later that year we enjoyed a “Luxury Escape” three day discounted package to the Peppers hotel in the Southern Highlands, a most relaxing getaway in a very tranquil setting. We then sold our caravan. It was sad to see it go as it had been our home away from home for many great trips all over Eastern Australia. But we hadn’t taken it out for two years and we weren’t going to now. We now liked our comfort in luxury hotels too much to want to subject ourselves to the caravan’s cramped and basic lifestyle again! This caravan had been a major part of our life for nine years.
Now we embarked on another cruise, this time to New Zealand. We boarded the Celebrity Line’s “Solstice” for our itinerary around South Island. Our first port of call was the awesome Milford Sound.
Rather than continue on the cruise from here we took an optional overland bus tour which took us to an overnight stay in Queenstown. From there we went to a nearby spectacular bungy jumping site at Kawarua Bridge. (No, we weren’t game to try this ourselves! We were just happy to watch others do the jump). Then the bus took us on to Dunedin to rejoin the ship.
Christchurch was the next port of call but we could not dock there as the harbour had been destroyed by recent earthquakes. Instead we docked at Akaroa, on the spectacular Banks Peninsula to the south, and travelled by bus to Christchurch. There we met up with my wonderful cousin Liz Garson and had lunch with her. There was then time for a wander round the creative shopping centre constructed from shipping containers before returning to the ship.
After calling at Rotorua, which seemed very different to our first visit in 1967, much more touristy now, we disembarked in Auckland. We hired a car there, our plan being to tour North Island, then cross to South Island by ferry, and finally spend a few days with my cousin Liz near Christchurch before returning home.
On North Island our first night after leaving Auckland was spent in the beautiful Coromandel Peninsula, the highlight being digging in vain for our own personal spa in the Hot Water Beach at Mercury Bay. I’m now convinced that this was a tourist trap fraud! Then we drove across to Waitomo, justly famous for its brilliant glow-worm caves. Our next night was in Napier, notable for its art deco architecture, where we saw an exhibition depicting the disastrous earthquake that had almost completely destroyed the town in 1931. After crossing to South Island we stayed overnight in Picton and toured the famous Marlborough wineries region. Then it was on to the small town of Oxford where we spent a relaxing few days with my cousin Liz before flying home from Christchurch airport in time for Christmas. This had been a very pleasant, though low key trip which left us refreshed for a change instead of exhausted! We were particularly struck by the almost complete absence of potholes whilst driving on New Zealand’s very well-maintained roads!
Three months later, in March 2015, we were off again on another trip, a very different one this time. Two of our bridge club professionals, David Beauchamp and his wife Anita Curtis, also organized tours as a sideline. They were putting together a nine-day trip to Japan which we signed up for. Anita was fluent in Japanese, which we found reassuring! Before joining that tour we arranged our own separate four-day Wendy Wu tour based in Beijing, escorted by a local English-speaking guide. We had perfect weather for this and got to see the Great Wall and some of the wonderful ancient palaces as well as the notorious Tiananmen Square.
We also went to a local restaurant specialising in Peking Duck which Nett really enjoyed. It was something she’d always wanted to do and she wasn’t disappointed!
After this, we flew on to Tokyo, just escaping a violent sandstorm in Beijing which reduced visibility to 30 metres. This was in complete contrast to the unusually clear 30km visibility that we had enjoyed while we were there!
Our “Bridge with Beauchamp” tour group in Japan consisted of some 25 or so bridge players, mostly female and many of whom we already knew. The tour was made up of three nights in Tokyo and six nights in Kyoto. We went sightseeing by day and had occasional bridge tutorials in the evening which made things interesting! We saw more shrines and temples than we really wanted to. However, travelling on Japan’s famous bullet trains was an experience to remember.
There was also a river cruise in Osaka where the famous cherry blossoms were in full bloom.
By way of contrast we also saw Hiroshima’s haunting Peace Memorial Park which commemorated the utter devastation left by the dropping of the atom bomb over the city in 1945. There were evening meals at local restaurants and a bridge night at a local bridge club so, overall, this was a great tour for us, if a little bit different to others we had been on!
Later, back home in August of that year, came another wonderful event. Peter and Yvette presented us with a second grandson, Miles August Danckwerts. We were so happy to have another addition to our family and of course we doted on him just as we had with Leo!
So there you have it. We had six great years of travelling around the world and the thrill of becoming new grandparents. It may seem, reading this chapter, as if it had been a mad whirl of one event after another. But in fact, spread over those six years, it was not like that at all. We probably spent less than ten percent of that time away from our home and continued to enjoy our home-based activities the rest of the time.
Nevertheless those were wonderful years. Nett really loved all the things that we were able to do, and there was so much variety! We planned everything very carefully and went for better class accommodation, both on ships and in hotels. Hardly anything went wrong. We even had excellent weather everywhere! In view of what was now about to unfold I am now just so thankful that Nett was able to enjoy the experiences that she did during these years.
But now, tragically, our world of happiness was about to come crashing down around us. Dark storm clouds were gathering over our lives. Nett was starting to get increasingly severe stomach and bowel pains. She had had these to a lesser extent in the past but now these were getting much worse.
One of my most painful memories comes from when we were on a local walk one day when Nett suddenly stopped and clutched my arm. “Chris, there’s something terribly wrong with me!” she cried.
Her GP and her gastroenterologist sought in vain to track down the cause of her pain. Finally she was sent for an ultrasound scan of her lower abdomen. On seeing the results of this scan Nett’s GP immediately referred her to a specialist gynaecological surgeon, Dr Sue Valmadre.
On 6 April 2016, the day before Nett’s 76th birthday, came the fateful date of her appointment with this specialist.
Next Chapter: Cancer
Nett 