Last weekend I hosted a Meetup to visit the Kurth Kiln Heritage Festival. From time to time I tell people who lament that having zero attendees is ok and that it happens to all of us. Well, this time it happened to me :). Life is like that sometimes. Regardless of the lack of turn-out I had a good time wandering around this little festival enjoying the displays of blacksmithing, vintage farm machinery, vintage cars and of course the rarely open setting of the kiln and its attendant village. I wasn’t too surprised at not getting any attendees because only one Melbourne person responded that they were coming and I heard from him in the morning that he’d had a long night and was going to skip. The others were from other countries. Why do people RSVP to Meetups they have no intention of going too? Lol.
Kurth Kiln is set amongst the Kurth Kiln Forest which is a state park of mostly natural bushland with loads of hiking trails and places to camp. The Kiln was established to produce charcoal during world war 2 to counteract a shortage of petrol (gasoline). The charcoal was put into a gas producer device mounted on the car and a fire lit, the combustible gas that came off the heated charcoal was piped to the engine to run the car, truck or bus. You had to be pretty important to the war effort be able to get one of these devices.
