The other week Lockhart celebrated a local festival, two events in one day. Saturday 9th March was the Antiques Under the Verandahs and Historic Truck and Commercial Vehicles Show Day. We worked like Trojans all night to make The Blue Bird look its best yet by opening up two thirds of the cafe and tripling the seating area. Roger and I finally dragged ourselves off to bed at 1.30am only to have to wake up to the alarm which was set to 6.00am for an early start to the day.
We opened the doors at 7.00am and soon after, the first of the stallholders at the antique market stalls lining the street under the verandahs, came in for coffee. From that moment until 2.00pm Roger did not raise his barista's head from the coffee machine while I served scones, jam and cream, pies, sausage rolls and a couple of old-fashioned favourite sandwich combinations, egg and lettuce and salmon, cucumber and cream cheese. A couple of local girls were on hand to help us out for the day and I am very grateful they were. There were a few organisational things we will get better at over time as we do more and more festivals like this one and Spirit of the Land but I think all up, we did pretty well and I hope that the visitors on the day appreciated having The Blue Bird open and trading again. And by the next Spirit of the Land we will be old hats as we will have last year's festival under our belts and know what to expect. It seemed appropriate though that we work as hard as we did before the Antiques day to get The Blue Bird looking as good as we could so that the visitors who have been used to coming to the iconic cafe would be able to get a glimpse of its future potential (just as we did when we peered through the window about this time last year).
The renovations have taken a lot longer than we anticipated (and than the town would have liked) but my answer these days to the question of "when will you be properly open", is: "we are open...come and see." We are working hard to re-establish a business that was closed for a year before we saw it. We fell in love with and bought a building with a lot of history and a great deal of potential underneath its sad state of disrepair. We did not by an operating business and so it is our efforts that have jump-started it to this point. And we bring to The Blue Bird Cafe our take on both its past and its future. We are not just reviving the tradition but we are injecting the practises of 2013 and starting a few traditions of our own. The Blue Bird has survived 110 years by moving with the times and still is.
So the answer to the more pertinent question about when we will be able to provide evening meals to the town of Lockhart would be: "in good time". Things done well do take time and with just two of us, Roger on the renovations and the coffee and me on the food, we are striving to do this well. But we also have ourselves to look after as well as The Blue Bird and if we were to do things with any more urgency than we already are, it would not be good for us. So be patient, we are getting there and keep looking in to see how far we have come. There is always something new these days at The Blue Bird Cafe.
