[m i a o w] the cat

So after a late night out at the Empress, which was balm to my parched out Hervey Bay soul, I got the Skybus from Spencer Street at 1pm for my 2pm flight to Brissie. Get that? I began at ONE in the AFTERNOON. When did I get home? Well, everything began to unravel once I got to the Tilt Train platform - up until then, my journey was running like clockwork. I was wandering around Roma Street station when I saw that it said ‘Tilt Train Departs Platform 10 at 4:30pm’. I yelped. Obviously. Because it wasn’t supposed to leave until 5pm - or so it said on my ticket.

I hared my way through the heat to Platform 10 with about 12 minutes to spare. No train. Four thirty ticked around, as did five’o'clock…Nothing. As time passed, the sun eased its way over the platform, so a couple of hundred impatient people were slowly baking, craning their heads to see if the bloody train was ever going to materialise. When it did finally arrive, it was a big tease. As soon as everyone had disembarked, they whisked it off away from the platform, further down the track, for ‘cleaning’. I am quite sure that this is trainspeak for ‘kicking back with a nice cup of tea, while gossiping about the fallout from the last big crash in Bundaberg’. So we’re all cooking on the platform, kids are whining, people are trying to find patches of shade and I can feel sweat running down my back and getting soaked up by my dress.

The train arrived properly at about six thirty. Oh the bliss of air-conditioning - although it was almost forgotten as they announced that everyone’s arrival times were now going to be wrong as we were running an hour and a half late. [groan] The trip was just interminable, made more so by the teenage freaks sitting behind me, whom I wanted to gag with gaffer tape before we even hit Caboolture. We hit Maryborough at 10pm and then the bus took me to Hervey Bay, where I finally saw M (who had been asleep in the van) at 11pm. I could barely speak from tiredness and frustration. Poor M, greeted by a travel weary harridan. Think of all the places I could have gone in those lost hours. Gah. Tilt Train? Never again.

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[…] ve not, thus far, had time to even squeak, let alone blog. After a relatively (relative to last time) relaxed trip down to Melbourne, I was standing at […]

[m i a o w] the cat » Wednesday was weird typed this on Mar 11 05 at 3:49 pm

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