One Year On...

Here we are at our second Spirit of the Land Festival.  We moved to Lockhart just three days before the 2012 festival and set ourselves up with scoop ice creams and slushies outside the shop.  This year's festival came around and we concluded that despite having participated last year, we still had no idea what to expect this time round.

Of course that is because this time, the cafe is open for business.  As we planned for this year's festival we reflected on how far we have come in that one year.  In December, financial necessity prompted us to open the front door with a drinks fridge and an ice cream freezer parked in the entrance.  That confused people a bit, not being able to get beyond the front door I mean, but it meant that we had a small income to keep us going while we painted and hammered and worked hard inside.

At the end of January, we started with a small menu of toasted sandwiches and seating just in the front window along the bar side of the shop.  Everything else was still barricaded off, a work in progress.  In March, we made a push to get more of the cafe ready to go on show.  We wanted to accommodate more people at the Antiques Under the Verandah weekend.  By that point we had about a third of the cafe open for seating.

Over the long, hard, slow crawl of winter, surviving our first year in business, we launched the Blue Bird Bookshop side of operations and the Blue Bird Pizzas.  The entrepreneurial spirit saw us through the winter months and prepared us for the spring season.

So now we have again made a concerted effort to, this time, open the restored milk bar for Spirit of the Land.  As a result we are pleased to have two thirds of the cafe open to customers.  At this year's Spirit festival we were able to use the bar as a milk bar again serving ice cream, milkshakes, fresh juice, spiders and coffee from behind the counter.  A new internal freezer has meant that we can use the ice cream/milk tubs as they were intended.  It has been a while since the bar has worked and as far as we know we are one of only a handful (if not the only) working milk bars left in Australia.  It is hard to imagine that once upon a time there was one in every town and now the genuine thing is an almost extinct breed.  But it was marvelous to step back in time and be a real Greek-Australian cafe again.  My huge thanks to all the helpers we had over the big weekend.  It was the teamwork, their enthusiasm and their tremendous efforts that made the weekend such an easy success and I know that they all enjoyed themselves immensely as I hope the visitors did.

So now we are recovering and settling in to the new set up, fine tuning our routine in the new look cafe.  We are looking forward to creating a new menu for summer.  So on that note, meet you at the Cafe for coffee and an ice cream...see you there soon.