I'm fibbing a little about the title as I would not in fact be leaving Coffs until several hours after the shot. It happened like this.

As per the PAD for yesterday I flew up for the funeral (see Saturday's PAD) on the Sunday and stayed the night. The main reason was that a friend of ours (French, long retired, doesn't drive) was also flying up for the funeral but the earliest flight she could catch would get her there with only around 15 minutes to make the service. Had I been on the same flight there is no way that we could have checked out the car from the rental company and made it to the funeral on time. (In fact this would have been true had I gone alone.)

Consequently I went up the day before, got the rental, drove to my nicely refurbished but far from luxurious motor inn, walked across the street and settled on a middle of the range Italian restaurant for dinner, had far too much to eat (because it was Italian), went down to the local IGA Grocery store to grab a couple of snacks for the next day and dragged my dropped jaw across the car park at the price differences between Coffs and Sydney, went back to my hotel, slept adequately, had a pretty decent breakfast at the hotel in a sunny courtyard on a day which was (as you can see) quite bright and mostly clear and indeed very pleasant if one ignores the fact that my closest friend was recently dead (which I concede to having had no small amount of trouble doing), drove to the airport to wait for our friend, was ripped off by the Internet kiosks which kept freezing when I tried to print our return flight check-ins, had a coffee, took this shot, waited some more and read my Kindle, had some lunch, grabbed our friend as soon as she got off the plane, charged out to the car park with her in tow, fanged[1] the rental like it was the Batmobile (to the extent that one can fang a Kia Cerato like the Batmobile), tried to find parking when there was next to none around, and thankfully we made it only a minute or so after the start of the eulogy.

That was as far as I can recall the first time I've been in a Catholic church (as I'm more commonly seen at the temple of St. Brian Cox) so I was just hoping that I didn't commit any major faux pas, however our friend, though a Catholic herself, was apparently disoriented as well. "But there was no coffin!", she said. "You walked past it when you went up to the priest for the blessing", I replied. And indeed there was one, and it was rolled past us into the hearse, and I swore at the universe for its part allowing the mere existence of something as foul as cancer, and then realised that the universe didn't really give a sh...er, didn't really care what I thought or called it so there was no point.

We then went to the local yacht / fishing / maritime club for the wake, shared some recollections about the departed, met a few people that we'd known only by description or e-mail before, and went on our way back to the airport.

Being a day for melancholy thoughts, as I was shooting this I thought "How many times did she see that sign as she flew down to work for me each week, or was heading off on the first stage of an around the world trip?" And regardless of how I may wish it otherwise, that was never going to happen again. And so starts the process of letting go, though you never do, entirely.

Even now, posting this shot some 4 months after it was taken, I still sometimes see something weird or quirky or amusing and think "Oh, I must tell...ah. Damn."

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[1]: For overseas visitors, "Fanged" = Australian colloquialism for "drove with high speed and great skill", derived from racing driver Juan Fangio.