Yesterday afternoon it was into the old German sports car for an expedition to the Bowral, NSW, childhood home of Don Bradman.

It was a lovely drive: turning off our familiar King’s Highway (amusingly called the B52) instead of zooming on to Canberra, we traced our course via Lake Bathurst (where no lake could be seen) to Goulburn and then hit the Hume Highway, a four-lane concrete affair with the thrilling speed limit of 110 km/h. A right onto the Illawarra Highway took us the rest of the way there, through green, rolling hills studded with picturesque forests and farms.

The last leg, through Moss Vale, Burradoo and Bong Bong (I swear I’m not making these up) is through an area long patronised by the well-to-do from Sydney, who erected noble mansions and horsy estates which command top dollar to this day. It’s very mink-and-manure – Range Rover country if you will – with many a des res.

For those who haven’t heard of The Don, Sir Donald George Bradman stands as the greatest batsman in the long history of test match cricket. Bear with me now, if you are one of those ‘eww, Cricket – boring!’ people, because this goes beyond cricket: Bradman’s all-time average of 99.94 runs per test match is rated by some as the greatest sporting achievement by any sportsman, ever.

Let that sink in. Greater than Babe Ruth’s .690 slugging percentage; Jesse Owens’ four gold medals in one hour at the ’36 Berlin Olympics (in front of one Adolf Hitler, if you need reminding); Roger Federer’s 23 straight Grand Slam semi-finals; Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak; Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10.

Forests of trees have been sacrificed to debate and analysis of his statistics, but that doesn’t concern us here (not the trees, the debate and analysis): statistics can reveal a great deal about a phenomenon, but some elements can’t be captured in numbers alone. The legend of the Don is so much more.

I like the detail that he honed his skills as a boy by hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump of about 1 3/8 inches’ diameter against a corrugated-iron water tank. The unpredictable trajectory of the rebounding ball required lightning-fast reflexes and to hit again; the slim, round stump required very precise striking to ensure the ball didn’t fly off at an impossible angle.

The traditional enemy, England, feared The Don’s prowess so much that in 1932 they invented a new, aggressive bowling strategy called bodyline which was deemed so unsporting that diplomatic relations between the nations were endangered. It may well be that this is the origin of the disapproving phrase, “it’s just not cricket.”

When The Don made his last test appearance at The Oval in London, his test average was a stonking 101.39, but he was uncharacteristically bowled out for no score (a ‘duck’ in the totally logical language of cricket), thus depressing his average to just under 100.

As someone who can’t hit a ball of any kind in any form of sport, much less one scorching down the pitch at 147 km/h, I can only contemplate the Don’s gifts with slack-jawed amazement. It’s the same feeling as when listening to a great guitarist – say Jimi Hendrix – after earnestly practising my four or five chords, or watching a leg of the Tour de France after shakily completing 25 nicely rolling kilometres outside Braidwood.

So we rolled into Bowral at about 3:30 pm and wandered about a bit, looking for antique shops and furniture emporia (the ostensible objective of our mission). I saw the sign for the Bradman Museum, but was happy to wait – we’ll be back. Bowral is a nice place: clearly prosperous, with lots of shishi shoppes, boutiques and cafés – and nicely-preserved architecture including an imposing picture palace, the Empire Cinema, dating back to 1915. Conceivably The Don showed up there after practice one night to watch The Jazz Singer with its new-fangled talkie technology.

Today’s adventures resulted in a nice sofa on order for Corner Cottage, coffee with a young and lovely cousin of Daniela’s, and tea with elderly and lovely friends of Daniela’s, in whose garden I took a photo of an Australian King Parrot which pleased me rather immoderately.

And thus homeward, retracing our steps on a sunny and stunningly beautiful evening. The Don chose to live out his twilight years in Adelaide, South Australia; his marriage to Jessie lasted 65 years and he worked as a stockbroker and company director and died on a respectable score at 92.

But I like him most because he was no okey-blokey sporting bonehead: he struggled with physical pain due to fibrositis and battled the demons of depression; he experienced financial troubles but re-established himself in the 1946-7 Ashes series with an average of over 91 including 187 in the first test and 234 in the second. He overcame.

This kind of historical musing is one of the pleasures of travel – remind me to recount my deep and unique thoughts on visiting Oswestry, Shropshire, birthplace of war poet Wilfred Owen. In the meantime, it’s bedtime in Corner Cottage and dreams of scoring centuries at Lord’s await. I can’t wait.