Tony
Dubbo is a good choice (used to live there a long time ago). Would you like to assist me in scoping the viability of running a national muster?
Gus
Sounds good to me, happy to help.
Spring 2011? Okay, that's far enough ahead to plan around. October it's starting to warm up nicely but the car races are on, we'll have to make sure we don't clash with other events that might preclude some people from getting out of their armchair racing seats. The October long weekend doesn't clash, has that extra day in it and seems like a good place to pop a marker for the time being.
The gazetted holiday is Monday 3rd October 2011. This means we'd be getting there on the evening of Friday 30th September. Is that too early in the year? Too late? Looks like the AFL Grand Final might be held on that Saturday, my wife and I will have to go up to the location and see what the TV reception is like. I'm a bit confused, another forum mentions the NRL Grand Final on the Sunday before the Bathurst race, which would again clash with our long weekend plans.
It might be better to go the week AFTER Bathurst and everyone just takes a flex day or something to make up for it? Maybe a couple of days of annual leave? I don't know how workable that is for everyone.
Catering? I hadn't thought of that. It's a problematic thing, because we don't know how many people are going to show up. We once organised a get-together and my wife and I bought 20Kg of sausages and heaps of bread rolls and everyone showed up with their own food. We had sausage sangers for a bloody month! I'm a little hesitant to look at catering.
If it were announced as a BYO-everything camp-over then we wouldn't have to worry about that side of things. In my mind, the most I'd want anyone to have to pay for is the stickers that go on the back window or the "rally badge" like we used to get at motorcycle rallies. They'd be cool, not sure where I could organise those but that's a minor detail.
So, I'll take my wife up there for a weekend and get accurate GPS coordinates, lots of photos etc. Won't happen until next year at earliest - we're now seriously into getting ready for the Christmas trip.