Village Road - Moss Vale - (Bradman Museum)
After freshening up in the morning, I had a shower and a cuppa in the van before driving back to the Village Road turn off. It took me around an hour and a half to walk back to Moss Vale town centre. It was Christmas Eve and everyone looked dressed up but also in a hurry to go somewhere. Many businesses were already closed for the Christmas holidays. Shekhar and I had a coffee and breakfast at a cafeteria in a relaxed atmosphere. Subsequently, we planned drive to Bowral, a place just 10 minutes away from our camping ground.
To visit the Don Bradman Museum at Bowral would be an honour. It would be like a dream come true. Don Bradman was born in a town called Cootamundra, which is about 250 Kms away. But he was just three when his family moved to Bowral and he grew up here. It would an understatement to say that visiting this museum was amazing and seeing the original cricket gear worn by Don along with other paraphernalia was something that would perhaps stay with you for quite some time. This museum is also home to the International Cricket Hall of Fame with selected cricketers from all the cricket playing nations. From Gary Sobers and Frank Worrel to Viv Richards, Richard Hadley, Sunil Gavaskar, to Sachin Tendulkar, Graham Pollock, Murali Mutthiatharan, Dennis Lilly, Bill O’Reilly, and of course Sir Don Bradman are all there.
Like any other museum, the Bradman museum takes you on a time travel from the inception of the game of cricket to its development into Test cricket, One Day Internationals (ODIs), with the more recent addition; namely, the Twenty20 game. It was an eye opener to learn that the first cricket player to score a double century was an English woman. The different forms of women’s cricket introduced in recent years at the international level are simply a representation of a repackaged lady’s cricket that now conforms to the current rules of the game. I learned about the smaller size cricket ball used in women’s game and the shorter length of the boundary. For men’s cricket, the ball weighs 156 grams versus 142 grams for women’s. The distance to the boundary was 65 meters for men as opposed to 55 meters for women. I didn’t know of these differences. Thus, the museum is also a source of learning.
The museum is home to so much cricketing and cricketers’ history like no other institution. A photo of Chris Tremlett who was 2 meter tall compares the height of Sir Bradman at 172 cms and Sachin Tendulkar at 165 cms. There is no question that its history revolves around the extraordinary achievements of the son of the soil; namely, Sir Don Bradman who even to date holds record for scoring the number of double and triple centuries in Test cricket. He was just one of a kind. There is no one like him let alone better than him. No wonder that the world over, Bradman is considered God of Cricket and rightfully so.
Adjacent to the museum is an oval named after Sir Don Bradman. Between the oval and the museum, there is a life size statue of the local hero. Just a few minutes’ walk from the oval and you could visit the timber house in which Bradman grew up. The house at 52 Shepherd Street is well maintained but remains off limits for the public.
At the end of our visit to this historic place, we drove back to our camping place in Moss Vale. I had raw carrots and radish for dinner while Shekhar had his favourite food; namely, pasta, yoghurt and fruit. And we slept happily ever after.
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