Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

After talking with Peter Miller at CodeCon, and other people over the last year or two, I've decided to put together a similar style of event. For a weekend, we all go off into the bush, far from the internet and other quotidian distractions, and write code, eat and drink well, and share great ideas. What's the difference? It's in a cave.

Well, not literally. The location that I'm aiming for is the Yarrangobilly Caves, an area of limestone caves and other scenic delights about seventy kilometres due south-west of Canberra, although it's about two hours by car because the direct route goes over the Brindbella mountain range. As well as the caves, there are bushwalks and (perhaps most importantly) a thermal spring pool to soak in after a hard day's slaving over the laptop. We would be staying in the Yarrangobilly Caves House, a historic homestead of the region offering bedrooms for up to sixteen people, kitchen, dining room, lounge, verandahs, and (also importantly) power.

Interstate visitors who didn't want to drive all the way could be picked up from Canberra airport or bus stations and ferried to Yarrangobilly on Friday evening, coming back to Canberra on Sunday in time for flights home or other onward travel. For those that wanted it, interstate or local, I would do catering for the whole weekend at a fixed price and with a roster for jobs. If we had the whole place booked optimally it would be about $60 per person for the weekend, the complication being that the rooms are not all single - there are some bunk beds and some doubles. They also only book by entire wings (9 or 7 people), so the fewer people the more it would cost per person, in certain ratios depending on requirements. At this stage the earliest we could get a booking for a weekend is late May or early June.

If you're interested in coming to this, please drop me an email. I really need to get firm bookings, preferably by the end of February, to have any chance of getting the accommodation booked and the pricing finalised. I wouldn't run the event if the cost was more than $100 per person for the accommodation, which means that it won't run with less than five people. There's also no way to accommodate more than sixteen people, so bookings would be limited in date order. Please also email me if you've got suggestions, because a lot of the planning is flexible at this stage.

This will also be posted to the CLUG list and the Linux Australia email list.

(P.S. Sorry if the environment.nsw.gov.au links don't work correctly, they seem to require session tokens which stuff direct linking up.)